22:10 - Part II - Asymmetrical Pieces

Chapter 8

The aged white numbers on the flaps of the antique flip clock clicked over.

6:15

The worn-out alarm sputtered and crackled. This morning, like almost every one of the last fifteen years, Eli reached over and switched it off. He had already been awake and lying there for the better part of an hour. Eli never slept through the night anymore, but he rarely got up, moved about, read, or did anything else insomniacs usually do. He just lay there trying to sleep. Always, trying to sleep. This particular alarm clock had been with Eli since he was nine years old, and the click of its numbers in the still darkness, like a slow metronome, paced and calmed him as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

With a deep chesty sigh, he sat up, rubbed the back of his neck, and reached for the running shorts on the chair. Then a T-shirt, socks, and running shoes. All were musty with the built-up smell of dried sweat.

Feeling sluggish, Eli knew he would be better once his blood started circulating. The autumn days grew shorter as each passed from the calendar, and now the morning was just beginning to break as he arose. Eli sensed without looking that today was overcast; a gray half-light barely pierced the fabric of the curtains. The draft of air around the window was cooler too.

The bedroom was little and attached to the back of a Victorian-period house, which had been cut into a few oddly shaped apartments and sectioned off by thin plaster walls. Although it was a two-level apartment, Eli's was the smallest in the building. Once, years ago, this particular room had been an attic. The landlord converted it by installing a steep, narrow stairway that led down to a lower level with a kitchen and a bathroom. Thick outer walls solidly held up the structure, but the interior woodwork was warped and creaked. The floors were especially uneven, and Eli tripped as he shuffled to the toilet.

Unsurprisingly, his entire apartment was sparsely furnished with low-quality bare necessities. In the kitchen there was a round table with only two wooden chairs, an electric stove, a box refrigerator, and a small sink Eli had piled with dishes. The bathroom was a former closet outfitted with a toilet and electric shower.

The half-hexagonal window with a pristine view of the sea from his bedroom was the only redeeming feature of the place. And that, indeed, was very redeeming.

Eli opened the door to a fire escape at the back of the kitchen and stepped onto its metal lattice steps and then down to the street. In fact, another door from his apartment connected to the front entrance and main hallway of the house, but he preferred to slip out the back to avoid his neighbors. It was not that they bothered him, Eli just hated small talk, and he was not interested in the nicety of being invited to their place for a visit.

He had been correct: the sun was nowhere in sight, and a cold, fickle wind brought goose bumps to his skin. But as Eli rounded the corner of Brynymor Terrace, the darkly resplendent rippling waters of the North Atlantic were below and before him as far as he could see.

Wales.

Out there beyond the horizon, about ninety miles away, lay the rugged eastern shore of Ireland. But here the earth under Eli was Welsh through and through. He walked down the slope to the seafront and onto the promenade above the aged and solid-stone seawall. Eli stretched his legs a bit, tipped onto the soles of the feet, and pressed into a smoothly paced jog. To his left, extending into the distance, was a town as old as the hills that surrounded it.

Aberystwyth.

During the Bronze Age, around 2000 B.C., humans had populated the nearby heights for its flint. An early Celtic hill encampment once shadowed the southern edge of the valley during the subsequent Iron Age around 1000 B.C. By the Middle Ages, the construction of a stone fortress upon the shoreline bluff marked Aberystwyth as a distinct settlement wedged between the hills and the Irish Sea. Castle walls once surrounded much of what is now the modern town, and some ancient street names continued to be used even after a millennium. Great Darkgate, the main thoroughfare, began as a medieval road that ran from one end of the settlement fortification to the other and exited through "the dark gate."