The First Time
an excerpt

The First Time

Chapter 1: The White floating doll house

Angel woke up feeling uneasy. He felt like throwing up, a sour taste in his mouth. He shifted in the bed before the alarm sounded six, disturbing his wife. She moaned and mumbled some complaint. Although he never snored, he had light sleep and moved around the house at night, checking on their daughter, late snacking and, most of all, doing “things” on the computer. She assumed he was working, but it annoyed her how long he stayed in front of the screen.
She rarely had any precise notion of when he cuddled under the covers, but the night before, she could swear he came to bed when the sun was already rising. He barely slept. On a Sunday morning, she could do without his insomniac rituals. She turned around and ignored him while he silently dressed and closed the bedroom door.
He assumed she was asleep. He would like to be left alone with his thoughts and confusing impressions. He knew he had to go, yet he could not explain why he had this urge to meet Ruby.
Angel was a high ranked lifter, known for his boldness and mysterious periods of absence from meets. The “Phantom”, Angel would submerge in his own world for two years and return just to set all the previous records again to himself. Quiet, focused, a bit frightening in appearance – hardly anyone spoke to him at competitions. For twelve years the records had been his and he was expected to hit some awesome marks that afternoon. He knew, however, this was not going to happen: Angel was not lifting that day. He had something else to do – what, exactly, not even he knew exactly.
For months, Angel had been reading Ruby’s articles and posts. At first, he couldn’t figure the woman. He found her at a sports forum explaining some training methodology to a beginner. He didn’t recall having ever met this lifter, who sounded experienced. Was she from another State? He followed her links and found out they lived at the same area. Actually very close – they both lived in suburbs of the same metropolis. Angel enjoyed his low profile and discreet manner, so he never asked anyone about Ruby. Instead, he investigated her by himself. It took him about an hour to find the basics. Ruby organized all the information about herself in an objective manner. She had a personal website that linked in hierarchical form to what she considered relevant information: her academic profile, her athlete bio and links to her writing. She kept a few blogs, mostly technical comments on health issues. He discovered she had a strong academic background, chiefly in the life sciences and that she was new to powerlifting. Her doctorate was on the social sciences, though – something related to anthropology.
He examined her bio and saw that her academic publications abruptly stopped in the year 2005. No record of further academic employment or activity. Instead, an obscure link to a consultancy service.
Ruby had strong opinions. He could feel by the contents of her articles and the silent reaction to her posts that she had collected powerful enemies in the sport. He wondered whether she had done so elsewhere. What was elsewhere? It seemed that this woman was not a real person, but an improbable collection of unrelated people.
One day he wrote to her. Just a short message agreeing with some opinion she had claimed, he did not remember where.
Ruby was surprised. She had always been curious about Angel, but never found the right excuse to contact him. She would like to have asked him the questions she felt would help her make the best decisions. Angel was an educated and intelligent man in a sport where most people had no formal background. Those who did were a handful of crooked lawyers who took advantage of the general lack of information, education and even self-assurance. And Angel was quiet. Whenever he spelled out his opinions, the discussion was quenched. A respected man, he seemed to have no enemies, or at least no one dared to confront him publicly.
Their correspondence started formal and technical. Right from the beginning, though, it was intense. There was a huge amount of unsaid material under the economic expressions both used. In a short time, they were exchanging e-mails every other day. Ruby hated chats and telephone conversations. He sensed that she avoided that by the way she fenced harassment from others. She was a lone wolf. In their email exchange, he learned she lived alone with her daughter, that she preferred not to discuss her personal life and that the exact nature of her work was not a matter for conversation. “I do consultancy”, she would say, with no room for reply.
Angel was an information and web specialist. He had been quite successful in establishing his business before the Nasdac downfall and survived the general shipwreck of the eighties. He enjoyed his work, but frequently found he was repeating himself. There was little challenge to keep him wired. Although he was a challenge driven man, he was also practical: he enjoyed the comfort of a stable income and the routine he built over the years.
Ruby was a disturbing element in that routine: unknowingly, she kept him for longer hours in the net, silently tracking her paths, uncovering her past, missing links in her career and life, all the hints to understanding this mysterious woman.
He knew she would be there that day: she was taking part on the competition. During the previous two weeks, her e-mails revealed a darker mood. Unwillingly, she had let him know that there was something going on concerning her performance. She always treated that as unimportant – she had a mission, she was committed with social change and had created a small set of related projects on that. Although he knew she was wholeheartedly devoted to those kids at the slum, he felt there was something wrong. He could not put his finger on it, but there was a discrepancy between her dry text and what he felt reading the messages.
It was then that the dreams started. In his dreams, he met her on the beach. The sea was motionless on the bay and she took his hand. She led him knee deep inside the bay and showed him a floating object. It was a small doll house. She turned her green eyes to him and said: “this is where I live”. And he woke up.
While he drove up country, he thought about the strange woman who lived in a floating doll-house. The strange woman who wrote about weird subjects and lifted weights. And he knew she was in danger.
Ruby was already there. She had arrived the night before. She registered at a small hotel downtown and had dinner alone. There was something stirring inside her. A mixture of sadness, mourning and excitement confused her mind. Should she succeed, she would lose the comfort of her present position. She was useful to her team as long as she provided support and occupied a modest role in the sport. She knew she had tapped into something powerful. She had been looking for it for long and, alone, she found she was beginning to master this unknown source of strength. But she was not sure it could be reproduced – she had never succeeded in doing it by her own will. It just came to her: the diluted feeling, the focus and the unreal sensation. It all started with her near death experience. And she had been searching it for two years. She had finally found it, but shared it with no-one. If she did succeed in the new road, then her partners would need to know. She feared them. One thing was providing information and insight – becoming the experimental subject was a whole different ball-game.
Alone in her room, naked, she looked at herself in the mirror. Who was she? Nobody actually knew and, in some ways, not even her. Maybe the next day, another woman would stand in that mirror and she had no idea what changes that would bring. Would she be able to demonstrate what she had conquered? Which of the powers in charge would react to that? What would they do to her?
She needed to sleep. She took a sleeping pill and finally managed to doze off. In her sleep, she dreamed she was walking on a dirt road. She shivered: it was the same dirt road where she had almost died two years before. Then a man appeared. His head was shaved and he wore glasses. He didn’t say a word and took her hand. Together they walked until they reached a straight sand path that led to a beach. They stood there looking at the tiny waves on the bay and sat down side by side. Then he turned to her and said: “where do you live?” She said: “I don’t know”.
Ruby woke up startled by the church bells. It was a small town and, like so many in the country, it was cramped with churches. At the central square there were three: the cathedral, one dedicated to the Virgin Mary and one to Saint Francis. Ruby took her breakfast and left the hotel. She decided to walk and think before the weigh-in. There was a fair on the main street. She wondered if it was a holyday. Children ran about carrying balloons and the smell of barbecue gave her nausea. She reached the central square and walked up the cathedral steps. There was a mass going on. She thought it was impolite to enter a church while service was being held. So she sat down and closed her eyes. She remembered words learned with friends from another life. With a little effort, she could sing a prayer. What for, she did not know. She was not emotionally familiar with the concept of God. But she softly sang the words she learned beginning with “our father” and ending with “forever and ever, amen”. She was sure there was no father looking after her – there never was. But something would take place on a “forever and ever” basis that day.
Ruby went back to the hotel and collected her stuff. She organized all her competition equipment in a bag. She took her time, did it slowly and deliberately, as if she was packing up for a long journey. She paid her bill and drove up to the Gym where the meet was being held. She was one of the first to arrive and had to wait until the weigh in was officially opened. She felt her heart beating fast and a tight grip on her throat. Fake smiles all around her made her want to hide in the bathroom, but that was where the weigh in was going to take place.