Three ideas

Who could be knocking on my door at six in the morning? Downstairs, the knocker hit the door mercilessly with five strong strikes. Five? Wouldn't it remind me of something? Of a certain night?

I rose from my bed looking for my robe. The first birds sang their songs for the morning outside. However, they sounded so distant when there should be hundreds of them right here around my house. I got downstairs, looked through the living room window. A black horse was tied to one of my porch's columns. Renan. Or could it be the Agent on his way back home?

"Renan? Is it you? Can I open?"

The tiny voice came from the porch, "fear not, it's just same old Renan out here", there was a touch of irony in the child's voice I could trace back to him even with the living room window still shut.

I opened the door. A Renan that was clad in black and blood-stained head to toes walked in the living room. I was stunned. He apologized for coming to visit me that way.

"I thought I'd drop by and apologize for that mess yesterday", he spoke with a sullen and ominous expression, brought by the night that had just died away, "I did raise hell downtown, didn't I?"

There was less pride in his voice than I would suppose. On the other hand, his tone of voice didn't let show the smallest speck of regret.

"I think so", I replied. Not many words on anything came to my mind at that time in the morning, let alone wise words on how to view life on a brighter side. I'm definitely not the one for self-help.

"Do you regret doing it?"

"Course not", he frowned, "why regret something that is so right? I warned them I was going to destroy their shop window. Gave them a whole lotta time. What else did they still expect to get from me?"

I told him to have a shower, gave him a robe and a towel.

"This robe won't fit me as it's too large", he protested, trying to get away.

But he ended up going to the bathroom and passed me the filthy clothes and the boots (that he should have already left downstairs at the laundry) by the door ajar. I threw the clothes into the washing machine and turned it on with hot water to try to wash away those heinous blood stains. Washed the boots in the tank, watching as the blood went down the drain until they were black once again, astonished at the amount washed. It was hard to wash them because of the quantity of low-relief details on the boots. I got upstairs and heard Renan singing a funk song under the shower. Then, when I was just about to come downstairs, lancinating screams came out of the bathroom that echoed in the whole of the house. I knocked on the door, alarmed, asked what was going on and heard Renan's voice amid the screams telling me that was the way it had to be. It took him ten more minutes and he got down all perfumed and fresh, like a recently blossomed bud. My heart still beat a bit out of its normal rhythm when he walked in the kitchen. From my laundry, the sound of the washing machine working for Renan and me.

"Other things collect during the night", he explained the screams I heard, "it's not only the physical dirt, you know."

"What in the world were those screams?"

"Three ideas I ran into last night", he brought his expression to a scowl.

I put the coffee and milk and the other things on the table. Out in the laundry, the washer started shaking Renan's clothes from one side to the other. We ate in silence for some time. Renan brought me in the eye, he wouldn't look away or pretend to be concentrated on something else. I asked him why he hadn't come in the shape of the Agent if he was working. He said he had appeared in the shape of the Agent, but I had no obligation to have a fright opening the door. And I remembered I had found the songbirds to be singing too far away from my house for a normal day. He smiled, but it was a bitter smile, when he heard me say this.

"Yeah, bogeyman was knocking on your door", and he suddenly sniffed.

"Is it like in the movies, as that of the Terminator, do you morph into one of another thing?"

"As Superman in the phone booth? No, I don't know if this is how it goes. But as I don't know how it happens, if you want to imagine this is this way, let it be this way. I'm a ten-year-old boy, don't understand a lot about these things."

"It might be that the power directs a certain appearance to specific people according to your needs for the moment", I suggested.

He beamed as though he approved of the idea. But said I should make no mistakes by seeing the Agent as something apart from him. He might be in plain clothes, but was the Agent just the same. He might be in the shape of the Agent, but that was Renan just the same. They were not, as I understood from his speech, separate entities.

"The Agent is the same boy you now see in front of you, feeling like an idiot because he's in this huge robe of yours…", he said, starting a seizure of laughter in me, "why are you laughing?"

I said the fact he was feeling like an idiot in the robe struck me funny. Besides, trying to convince me that what I saw on the horse on Wednesday was a child was three times as funny. He smiled. Said it was really a child on the horse, but, as I had put it myself, the power showed him to us in that brutally sinister aspect in the night.

"Why didn't you show up that night as you are now? Why would the power need to show you like that?"

"Miss Grisam, don't you confuse these things. The Agent is right here having breakfast with you. The Agent was the one on the horse at the square yesterday in front of "sêo" Alberto's and Anderson's store."

The Agent had accumulated such a negative charge in himself in my view that I couldn't help but feeling shivers up and down my spine when he said that to me. The very thought that monstrous thing could be here nonchalantly in my kitchen sharing my breakfast gave me the goosebumps. Renan glanced at my arm and seemed to perceive that at the same moment. He told me when he appeared, he did so to scare us, what he would never manage to in his normal everyday aspect. He needed our fear to recharge his reserves of power, to accumulate more and more power. As a videogame creature eating things along the way to double its strength, health, this is how he charged himself as he rode in the big night.

We ate a bit more in silence. Renan asked me to let him repeat the mug of coffee, I told him he could eat and drink as much as he wanted to.

"This thing of the aspects has to do with the situation at the time", he took advantage of the situation to illustrate what he meant, "now I'm in this huge robe of yours because you are washing my clothes and I ain't got clothes to wear right now", the boy had a good laugh out of his own explanation, "'tis a weird aspect, because I'm never in a robe, let alone this size and I only wear pajamas (and in pajamas it is yet another aspect of mine), but all of this is just the fellow whose name is Renan Augusto Giacomin Teixeira, who is Brazilian, who was born in the city of Taurinos, in the state of Minas Gerais."

I told him I understood. He explained to me more or less what made me puzzled about him. I reminded him that he said it was a part of him. He replied he had said that in the sense of aspect, it was not like he was divided into two things. Reminded him that he told a part of him was home sleeping as he rode his horse in the night.

"Isn't it to be divided into two things?"

"No, because in your town it was important to know whether you were sleeping or awake. Here in Taurinos, it doesn't matter."

I asked him to elaborate on that idea. He said that was what he meant. That all was solid, dream, reality, nothing was apart, all of it was entwined. There were only different aspects in everyday life.

"When I came here the other night and knocked on your door, you and I could be sleeping, you know."

"I'm sure I wasn't sleeping, Renan."

"And what makes you so sure?", he smiled, defiant.

I realized I could be mistaken. The little brat was right. Yes, what made me so sure I wasn't sleeping that night? A succession of events from the day's first break to the time I planned to go to bed? The fact I was getting ready to go upstairs and get myself some sleep?

The washer had finished its work on Renan's clothes. I left him at the table and put the clothes in the dryer; I was astonished to see all of the stains had vanished completely from the fabric. I immediately thought that wouldn't disappear in only one washing session. Went back to the kitchen and Renan was not there anymore. Where'd he go? Nowhere in my house, it seemed. Looked everywhere and there was no sign of him. Thinking he was going home completely naked, went to the dryer to get his clothes and try to catch up with him so I could give them back to him. There was nothing in the dryer. Also, his boots had vanished from the tank. At the front of the house, no more horses. Only a sudden wind bringing dust and filling my eyes with it. When I finally opened my eyes again, I was in my bed. The moment I realized I was in my bed, the knocker hit the door mercilessly with five strong strikes.

I rose from my bed looking for my robe. The first birds sang their songs for the morning outside. I got down, looked through the living room window. At the porch, Andrés looked at me through the window and smiled.

"It's seven o'clock", he told me, looking at me in a strangely amused mode, "won't you come to make us some coffee?"

I changed clothes and went to the farm, commenting with him about the strange dream about Renan. He glanced at me puzzled as he walked and affirmed he had just seen Renan pass him by on his way, coming from my house.

"Never seen him come back from work in clean clothes, I think it was first time today", he commented.

"But it was a dream, Andrés…"

"Sez who?"

Promise of shadows | Night and day

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