The Blue Bottle
I started this story several years ago and posted excerpts here, but I never finished it. This year, I finally got around to doing just that. It is a science fiction romance.
Part 1: Frank
Frank stands looking out from a clifftop toward the distant but gathering storm. He is wearing a cumbersome black leather overcoat, a black Fedora long past its freshness, which makes him look like a character from an old gangster movie.
After a minute or two, Frank feverishly digs inside his coat pocket for a cigarette, pulling out a half-crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights. Then, tapping the corner of the packet on one palm, slips out a damaged smoke and shoots it to the side of his mouth, where it shakes between his lips while he flutters the cupped match flame under it. Frank inhales deeply, taking a moment to study the encroaching violence, its electricity sparking, splitting the clouds.
The storm is ten years in the future. Tonight, though, it is clear, and a sliver of the moon’s light silhouettes Frank as he draws again on the cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs for a long time. It calms him. Out there, in the splintered moonlight, Frank knows that Lorenzo is waiting.
There will never be an end to Frank, no cancer, no single shot to the head, living in eternity with the regret of what he’d done: that dreadful instant in time, that momentary weakness, and now living with the eternal shame under many pseudonyms, searching for the Blue Bottle.
Without its contents, Frank knows he will never find forgiveness, never fulfill his need to love or be loved, and will instead live in purgatory for his betrayal.
Throwing down his cigarette, Frank stubs it into the soil with the toe of his boot before turning away. It is a quarter past midnight. Frank’s thoughts recall a conversation earlier in the evening, having a drink in the pub.
The bar girl, Rosie, a Dublin child, thought Frank weirdly fascinating. He
appeared friendly enough, so Rosie asked where he was staying. Dublin has many beds and breakfast establishments, and he is surprised when he tells her he is staying at the library.
She laughs at the joke. Libraries, while almost extinct, only stay open during the night.
Rosie is unaware that Frank is not having a drink in the pub by chance but had been instructed to locate her and make friends, the Raven once told him. She can help you.
Having found her, Frank is surprised by her appearance. She is so young, the redness of her hair, the man’s shirt she’s wearing, way too big on her, a billowing skirt, unashamedly short, and hand-painted lace-up boots, flowers, she told him.
While walking home, Rosie had also thought Frank’s conversation was unlike anything she’d ever heard.
‘You see, Rosie, it’s not that I want to go back too far, just far enough to meet up with the Raven. Spend some time in the old farmhouse, walk across the small clots of rich soil, reddish-brown, see the tip of his hat and hear the summer wheat in his breathing. I was there once, but drifted seaward, carried through time on the wild wind and the driving of the tides. We are different, you see. Raven knows the secret of the blue bottle.’
It is a quarter to ten, fifteen minutes to closing time. What did the stranger mean when he spoke about a blue bottle?
Who talks that way? Even crazy people don’t talk that way; drunks, poets, none talk the way the stranger had spoken. She’d never heard anyone say the things the stranger had said since she watched Captain Kirk and Star Trek.
In the pub, Rosie had asked: ‘So, if I understand, you lost track of this…er, Raven person?’
‘Yes, Rosie. After Lorenzo.’
‘Lorenzo?’
‘Yes, on June 10, 1960, Lorenzo turned up in Cuba. It seems he had discovered that Raven had been living in a room on the twenty-second floor of the hotel Cohiba, in Havana’s Vedado section. Lorenzo disguised himself as a priest, living among prostitutes as his acceptance into that community.’
Rosie left to serve a client and dry a few glasses before returning to the stranger. ‘You’re just about the funniest man ever walked through that door. Even if I understand what you are telling me, it’s this thing about time travel…?’
‘It must seem very strange, Rosie. I need to go back farther than the time in Cuba. Two thousand years, give or take. Time travel must feel like a very confusing and complex notion.’
Rosie remembers that remark and was indignant. ‘Not at all, I followed Captain Kirk, Doctor Who, and I saw Back to the Future three times.’
Frank understands, ‘I’m sorry, Rosie. I forget sometimes how far in the future I’ve come while chasing Lorenzo. The last time I got close to him I was travelling in a railway car from Cadiz on my way to Tangier. He was eating a green banana, passing himself off as a Spanish nobleman, a visionary. He appeared very aware of himself and spoke strangely, as a poet, saying his visions had to be smelled, fondled, and listened to. When anyone got to know him, they discovered strange things, unfathomable, repulsive…and then again, delightful things. Around women, well, it was as if he stirred a symphony inside their hearts. Around men, they became mere skeletons. Either he must die, or it would be Raven, then me, Rosie. I killed Lorenzo after an earthquake, buried him under tons of rubble, or so I thought.’
‘Oh Jesus, Mary, and Jospeh,’ Rosie said, crossing her chest. ‘You killed a man in 1960?’
‘I hoped so, Rosie. Unfortunately, he’s still alive. It is imperative I find Lorenzo before he finds Raven, and the Blue Bottle. Right now, Raven is in mortal danger.’
‘How old were you when you believed you’d killed a man?’
‘It doesn’t matter, age isn’t important,’ Franks tells her.
‘So, let me understand this, are you telling me you need to go back to 1960 to find him? And kill him for sure?’
‘No, Rosie. Lorenzo has moved on. In order to end the evil of Lorenzo, I must first find the Blue Bottle.’
‘Why? To beat him over the head with it?’
‘No, Rosie, to have him drink from it.’
It was just starting to rain as Rosie reached home, a second-floor apartment in the middle of Dublin. The mile-and-a-half walk from the pub had been consumed with thoughts about the stranger.
Late in the evening, Frank offered: ‘Come with me, Rosie. I’ll call for you.’
‘Come? To where?’ Rosie inquires as if she would.
‘To find Lorenzo.’
‘Why are you so fearful of this man?’
Frank answers, ‘Lorenzo is life without hope. Forever.’
It was madness for Rosie to have agreed. There’s no scientific evidence for time travel. Still, the man is the most charismatic person she’s ever met, a cliche, dark, tall, and, in his way, handsome. Why has she agreed? It is insanity. If he comes, she will refuse, tell him there’s no way. His conversation was fun and entertaining, but she wasn’t about to go anywhere with him.
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