Waking up alone ate him alive -- to expect the warmth of another human being next to you as you gently surface from the sea of slumber, only to find that there is only a cold stain of where they should be. He had taken it smoothly, and read immediately into the subtleties of the gesture. She had gone, and had taken the blessed places she'd stepped in, leaving a scar in the bedsheets -- a crater where there had once been a flaming meteor. It had been received in solemn silence rather than a burning agony of tears and loss. Losing someone had become second nature to him; the experiences he still held in his robbed memory bank were termites biting away at the healthy foundation of the building of his personality, until it had been chewed into a shell of what it had once been, transformed from a sturdy wooden monument of what could have been into a twisted shadow of painful architecture.

No, David did not let this eat away at him. He had long expected it -- not because he felt there had been anything wrong with their pairing, but because it was how he had come to believe all things must end: quickly, silently, and expected. He had thrown up his shield, knowing the spear must fall from the sky eventually. No Greek warrior of interpersonal anguish was worth his salt if he couldn't hit a standing target. And standing he had been, frozen in a state of immobility and isolation, deeply locked in his own skin, which had no key to its rusted-shut lock. All he could have ever done was watch from behind the tempered wood of the shield as the spear came tumbling downward, tragically on-point. But he had warded off the spear as it lodged in the shield, splintering pieces of his defenses, but leaving his protective distance intact and free of a bleeding puncture wound to the heart.

So he had accepted it with an iron-clad heart, which sank to the pits of his empty stomach. There, he locked it away under the same flesh prison walls that held his insecurities. The inmates would not be stirring up trouble with his warden on lookout -- his conscious thought dominating the woe that threatened to break out by tunneling behind a poster of Raquel Welch.

With bones that felt made of stone, David rolled out from beneath the covers and rose solemnly to his feet, looking forlornly over the vast emptiness of the bed, now with two scabbed over scars where wounds had once been. Ever task-oriented, David's mind shifted gears in a brash clutch movement, and he recalled the article he was supposed to be writing about the local Parisian class climate. He moved briskly toward the desk opposite the bed, words pertaining to his subject flashing across the room like phantoms: capitalism, materialist, trickle-down, fashion- debonair...

But there, upon the desk, was a completed transcript of what he was hired to write. Confused, David picked up the article and read it over twice. After the first reading, David had the slightest feeling that the words seemed so familiar, but he just couldn't recall why. It was reminding him of something he'd lost, and David tacked this up to Mystica having stolen the memory of why they were so familiar. But little did David know that, with his face contorting in horrific realization, while reading through a second time, that it would suddenly all click into place. He was a bright man, but not too quick on the uptake. Creeping along the back of his head was the ivy of fear, entangling itself in his cortexes. His lips drawn in, as if holding in that last breath of calm air, and turns his head aside. Here, he has no choice. Nothing can hold back the floodgates. In one massive explosion of fear, David doubled over, as though he had been stabbed in the stomach, and let out a horror-filled scream that would be talked about by hotel staff for years to come.


Mystica had not only stolen his memories.

Mystica had not only stolen his body.




Mystica had stolen his mind.

Later that morning, just moments before the clock would tick past eleven o'cock, signaling the period where he would be forced to pay for a second night, David Martin emerged from his bedroom and arrived downstairs with an elevator bell that sounded like an entire bugle brigade to him, as he, the Emperor, walked into a grand event: the emergence of a boy born anew in the ocean of despair. The world's first light that shone into his eyes was a bright one. His ashen, almost translucent skin highlighted him within a halo of lux. In one hand, he carried the single, cheap travel bag that held the entirety of his earthly possessions. In the other,a wrapped painting, the frame visible beneath the shroud of taped-together newspaper. Across his chest hung his laptop case -- a tarnished old rag of a thing, the edges frayed and some stains adorning the cloth surface -- which bore the scars of loving use. Like a creature crawled out of a cave, David moved, sunglasses hiding his tired eyes, in a strange, fearful sort of stagger.

Witnesses will say he had a strange, deep sort of voice, which kept cracking into a strange higher pitch on certain words and phrases as he spoke to the front desk, officially checking out 12 seconds before the clock would have indirectly cost him another night's cost of sleep. When he turned to go, one group of two witnessed David Martin flash a smile at a person passing him. From two separate angles, two men had witnessed different emotions adorning the visage of David Martin as he smiled. One man saw the gleeful grin of a maniac, as though the strange Englishman had won the lottery. The other witness saw only a face wrenched up in hopelessness, the furthest from a real grin, as the smile begged for assistance -- any assistance.

But no one paid him any mind. He was just another weirdo in the future legend of the hotel -- just another strange guy during the morning shift now, but a story of refute in the near future. But no one knew his name aside from the front desk clerk, who David knew was not the gossipy type; he could read it in her eyes -- the eyes of a girl, fearful on her first few days of work, and David Martin had now ruined that job for her. She would sit up at night, racked by nightmares of the half-demon man that had checked out on a cool October morning and disappeared into the streets of Paris, like a ghost in the fog. He had left a scar on her soul -- the young woman, just entering into the world of the underclass French adult after her enseignement secondaire, would return home to her mother and inexplicably break into tears. Her floodgates too had opened, cracked, and broken, spilling all the fear and existential anguish into one massive, near-atomic emotional break. She'd always carry that scar on her memory, even as she aged and long forgot her first real job of two weeks. The feeling would creep on her like a series of vines, growing across the walls and bedspread, climbing gently over the blanket mound that was her sleeping husband, and entangle her, ripping her world into a massive panic attack, of which the emergency room physician would not be able to determine an origin. She would sit up on the bed long after lights-out, wrapped in the hospital bedspread, like a child hiding beneath the blanket to escape the boogeymen that lurked in the dark. Her eyes shocked into a perpetual state of wide open, she would watch in abstract dread as the face of the man she had witnessed smile at her 9 years prior oozed forth from the cracks in the floor tiles and ascended unto her, locking the ex-desk clerk in a catatonic state from which she would never emerge, forever dreaming, slumbering in eternity with the Sleeping God.