The Cracks in the Labyrinth

Chapter 6 (Part 2)

Adam thought he'd see himself sixteen years younger.

He was wrong.

Instead of smiles at his high school graduation ceremony, instead of fragments of his old principal's speech, a different recording started playing on his phone. In it, Adam's parents were not waving at the camera, and there was no close shot of the generic messages (like "Never change" or "Good luck in college") that his former classmates had written on the beige shirt of his school uniform.

In front of his eyes, there was a memory that he wanted to remain forgotten.

"I'm sure that I destroyed that tape."

What Adam wanted to see was his little sister on his phone's screen as a nine-year-old again, her arms around his neck while he held her, more like a father than a brother. He knew that the seven-year gap between them and their parents' untimely death had changed their relationship forever.

In fact, his grandmother had told him days before the Red Christmas, when he and Bianca weren't on speaking terms, that she loved how they treated each other more like father and daughter than siblings, which was remarkable to some people since their resemblance was difficult to see at first sight. Bianca was small and had straight hair, Adam was heavy, and his hair was unruly with a brown dash. They both, however, had the same dimples when they smiled. Their laughter left no room for doubt. Strong blood ties bound them.

That's what I want to see. My family... smiling. Not this crap.

Adam was looking at himself in the video playing now, not in high school but at the end of his college days. It was him as he had been ten years ago, tired and crushed by guilt.

The Adam from the video placed a camcorder on a tripod. The device, always recording, fell to the side on top of a flowerpot, something that went unnoticed to him as he focused on opening another Polar. The removed bottle cap chinked near the cluster of bottles on the coffee table, covered with documents and folders, in front of the sofa where he sat down.

It wasn't until Adam from the video put three empty bottles on the floor while looking for the remote that he realized the camcorder was sideways on top of their aloe vera plant.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Bianca said off-screen.

"My job." The skew angle of the camera didn't prevent it from capturing Adam's frustration. "There's still time."

"Is this the recording Rafael asked you to do?"

"No! Not at all. This is my video diary. I'm about to confess to the camera which of the Backstreet Boys makes my panties wet," Adam stopped for a second. "And don't speak about Rafael. I shouldn't have told you about any of this."

Bianca walked in the living room, arms crossed on her chest. She was seventeen, and her dark, shoulder-length hair hardened her sweet features.

"Are you having beer for breakfast? A bit early to be drinking."

"Haven't gone to bed, so it's actually very late for me."

Bianca picked up some bottles from the table and, not noticing there were more on the floor, she knocked down a few with her foot, spilling warm beer all over. In the video, you could see this was when she registered just how drunk her brother was.

"I'm done."

She dropped the bottles on the coffee table; soon, these were spilling their foaming insides on the documents he was working on.

"You are nuts!"

Adam cleaned up as fast as he could.

"I mean it," Bianca said. "I'm not letting you throw away our future with yours."

Inside Lili's apartment, the Adam from the present squeezed his phone with enough strength to break its screen. It never crossed his mind that he would regret paying to digitize his old home videos after his grandmother called him a few months ago, threatening to throw away his old VHS tapes if he didn't visit them.

After shouting at her that he was too busy to travel, Adam paid Raul, a colleague from Mérida, who looked like a roadie from the grunge era, to get the tapes and digitize them. A few weeks later, his old collection of VHS tapes was in his Dropbox.

"I paid a pretty penny," Adam had told Raul. "And I plan to get my money's worth."

To make sure that the work's quality was up to par, Adam had downloaded a few random videos from his recently digitized tapes to his phone. Unfortunately, he hadn't been able to watch any of them until now. The good news was that there was nothing to complain about the delivered product. The bad news was that he'd discovered this by reliving one of the worst moments of his life.

"Throw away my future?" the Adam from the video said. "I fought to get in 'La Misión,' B. I'm not giving up."

"Dumb dumb, I beg of you. I printed your resignation letter. Sign it and get your soul back."

"That Misión is going to make us rich."

"At what cost? This internship is killing us."

"You're overreacting."

"Am I?" Bianca pointed at bottles surrounding him.

"I can stop drinking whenever I want."

"Just like dad?"

That comment hurt both Adams, the one from the video, and the one sitting on Lili's couch.

Shakespeare was your thing. Right, Bianca? Adam pressed the screen with his thumb to stop the video. Didn't he say that the pen was mightier than the sword? That words are more dangerous than the most lethal weapon of his time? Well, God blessed you with the gift of the gab...

"And cursed the rest of us in the process," the Adam from the present said to himself, looking away from the video and out the window of Lili's apartment, where rain kept pouring down.

He pressed the screen again. His phone refused to obey him.

The Adam from the video clenched his jaw, his face red with fury, while the Adam from the present tried to get his Samsung Galaxy to do what he wanted.

Dammit.

"I'm in control," the Adam from the video howled.

The Adam from the present tried to pause, close, minimize ... get rid of that cursed video in any way possible.

After countless tries, the screen went black.

"Finally."

The audio, however, continued. It was like his phone was possessed.

It didn't matter that Adam removed his earpiece and closed his eyes; that video had infected his brain, opening one of the most painful wounds of his past.

To be continued...