Sky Parlor: A NOVEL

by Stephen Perkins

  “I really hope you can kick as good as Bobby and Coach Hammond claim,” Lucius winced as he heard Loman’s baritone growl. “But anyway, even though you’re a saint,” and while Lucius felt his pulse begin to thunder at the walls of his veins, he saw the corners of Loman’s mouth begin to crack into a grin, “Welcome to the team.” As a slow leak of air escaped Lucius lips, he reclined his back against the door of his locker.

  Then, the scattered murmurs filling the locker room fell silent as Coach Hammond emerged from his office adjacent to the locker room and broadening the rounded shoulders of his squat frame, proceeded to strut amid the gathering of varsity players.

  “I guess for everyone suited up tonight, especially the seniors for whom this will be your last game in an Eagles uniform,” the coach’s stentorian voice echoed off the dull blue tiles of the locker room wall, “I suppose I don’t have to tell you – whether win or lose – this is probably the biggest moment of your young lives, a memory that you will cherish for as long as you live. One that you will, without doubt, want to tell your children and your grandchildren about. So, let’s go out there tonight and make some memories.” Hammond’s basso profundo rose in crescendo. “And let’s honor the memory of those we recently lost, so that each one of you – from now until the rest of your days when you walk down the street with your heads held high – everyone will say – there goes a champion.”

  The locker room erupted with a tumult of bellowing cheers. Lucius followed his teammates as they burst through the locker room’s door and out through a dark tunnel, charging into an explosion of white light and onto the emerald green field dewed with soft mists of cascading rain.

  Standing on the hometown team’s sidelines, Lucius saw a smiling Boudica donned in a game official’s orange and yellow vest with a grey hoodie fastened about her helmeted plume of red hair. At her feet lay a draw strung nylon bag filled with game balls.

  “Well, your transformation into a varsity gridiron warrior is quite impressive, Lucius,” she quipped in her typical sardonic fashion. She glanced at Bobby who, while the entire varsity squad stood in tense anticipation behind him, was busy fastening his green helmet’s chin strap as the crowded stadium howled with unbridled applause for the arrival of the home team.

  “Don’t you worry, Boudica, by the time we’re done kicking Arcadia all over the field, Lucius here is going to be the star of the game,” Bobby said. “Along with me, of course.” He winked while flashing a smile.

  With his nerves throbbing in time to the resounding cheers of the crowd – EAGLES, EAGLES, EAGLES – Lucius merely nodded with an upturned chin and managed a wan smile.

  “Alright Loman, Ken, Tepper, and Lucius,” Coach Hammond barked before the Eagles took the field for the opening kick-off. “This is going to be our strategy for special teams. Listen, Son,” Hammond said, settling his burly hands on Lucius’s shoulders. “I want you to kick it real high for maximum flight time right to the edge of the goal line. That will give our three co-captains, time enough to get downfield and pin Arcadia deep with a good solid tackle and maybe Bobby, if you can get it, strip the ball loose – Ken and Loman will be right behind and get some of their good hands on it for the recovery – okay? Alright, let’s go make it happen and make some memories tonight, right?”

  Lucius fastened the chin strap of his green helmet emblazoned with a screaming eagle. His fingers felt the cold residue of moist droplets of mist as he adjusted the helmet’s white face mask. Boudica reached into the red nylon bag, and pulling out a single brown colored ball, extended her arm and dropped it into his awaiting hands.

  “Don’t worry Lucius,” she said as her emerald eyes sparkled with an angelic glow. “For once I agree with Bobby, you’re going to be the star of the game.”

  Behind the stallion charge of his varsity teammates, Lucius took his place at center field, and with the game ball cradled in both hands, he crouched at the knees to firmly place it onto the plastic holder planted into the wet grass. He twisted the tip of the ball to make certain it was strategically positioned, with the white laces stitched into the hand-tooled leather facing him. Inhaling a gulp of moist air, he raised his hand to give the signal to the head official that his team was ready for the game’s opening kick-off. Over the prolonged cheers of the stadium’s capacity crowd, he heard the shrill whistle of the head official along with Boudica’s straining yelp of encouragement.

  “C’mon Lucius, kick it all the way to the moon and push Arcadia way back.”

  Backing away from the white three-pronged placeholder to join his teammates spread out in a straight line across the mid-field stripe decorated with Columbia’s school mascot, a fierce-eyed bird of prey, he squinted into the hazy fog hovering over the field to glimpse Arcadia’s snarling, red shirted opponents standing as if in battle array. Lucius charged at the teed-up ball and his ten teammates propelled forward like a phalanx of battle tanks. The tips of his cleats planted into the soggy grass and making solid contact, Lucius watched the ball begin to sail like a spiraling comet above the apex of surrounding stadium lights.

  “Wow, Tepper was right,” Boudica heard Coach Hammond comment through a delighted grin. “Your friend Lucius sure has one powerful leg – maybe next season I should start recruiting more saints.”

  “While you’re at it, Mister Hammond,” Boudica replied, “Would you ever think about recruiting a girl for your team?”

  The receiving Arcadia player at the other end of the field peered up into the darkness and, confused as to the trajectory of the ball’s flight, shuffled his feet along the edge of the goal line. In a perfect arc, the ball began to plummet towards the earth, and finally catching sight of it through the glaring corona of stadium lights, the receiver held out his awaiting hands. A swell of cheers rose as the ball glanced off the receiver’s fingertips. While a swift charge of Columbia’s players drew ever closer, the ball fluttered and fell to the wet grass, where it settled like an immovable boulder. Lucius heard the crunch of pads amid the mayhem whirl of bodies, and as chaotic adrenaline surged like a raging river, he sprinted ahead of his teammates, churning toward the edge of the goal line.

  “That’s a fumble, grab it up Lucius,” Bobby’s bellow cut through the aural mayhem.

  Loman and Ken’s freight train charge converged upon the pursuing Arcadia opponents. As they swooped in, their battering ram shoulders squared, knocking several of them reeling to the soggy turf. Lucius became airborne and dove for the loose ball, securing it in a tight grip as he felt the unbearable weight of bodies pile upon him.

  “Go for it, Lucius, you’ve got it,” Boudica hollered.

  Coach Hammond hurried downfield along the length of the sidelines to address the head official as he positioned himself near the chaotic scrum to make the decisive call.

  “Well, do we have the ball ref, is that a touchdown?” he yelled at the head official, balling his fists.

  The pile of bodies became separated, and while feeling buried in a rain-soaked morass, through the clumps of mud and wet grass clogging up his facemask, Lucius glimpsed the head official’s dirt smudged black cleats and legs clad in white cotton erected like marble pillars over the crest of his helmet.

  “That’s a fumble recovery and a touchdown for Columbia,” he signaled with a guttural bark while casting his arms covered in zebra striped white and black straight into the overcast gloom.

  Wild and cacophonous cheers filled the stadium.

  Loman, Ken and Bobby reached down to lift Lucius to his feet from the cusp of his shoulder pads. While amid the wild gaggle of his celebratory teammates returning to the sidelines, Lucius’s shoulder pads and his helmet became knocked askew from the hosts of congratulating fists pounding at him like incessant hammers, and he felt his dizzy head electrified with spasmodic jolts.

  “I knew you could do it, Lucius, I just knew it,” an ecstatic Boudica declared, beaming.

  While wiping his sullied face mask clear of the muddy debris Lucius felt the blood within his t
hrobbing heart wildly surge and looking up, he saw Loman and Ken towering over both him and a smiling Boudica.

  “Hey, way to go freshman; way to sacrifice for the team,” Loman said.

  “Yeah, nice play, Holden,” affirmed the hulking Ken.

  Lucius winced as simultaneously, their rock fisted hands like giant mallets wrapped in reams of white tape struck affectionate slaps to the sides of his helmet slicked with spitting rain and soggy blades of grass.

  “Maybe Bobby’s right and my dad has got it all wrong,” Loman said, “and saints aren’t so bad after all.”

  *

  Desmond peeked out of his office window at the gloom crept over the city environs and pecking his palm to activate his holo-screen, noticed it was well past six o’clock. Once again, he imagined, his diligent ambitions, combined with the exhausting administrative duties of his position as Alderman served to preoccupy him until well-past normal working hours. As he heard the door to the darkened confines of his office shut behind him, the steady tap of his shoes on the marbled sheen of the hallway induced memories of his most recent dreams, and he began to mull over what the strange spirit had revealed to him about his professional and personal mentor, Pembroke. Was it even possible, like the president, Pembroke had acquired vested interests in championing the elevation of his career with political and even ulterior motives in mind?

  Desmond’s mind tried to abscond from what seemed inconceivable as his quickened feet trotted down the long-terraced steps of the trade commission building. Firefly beacons of light from the hordes of sustainable bicycles pierced a lingering curtain of misty gray fog that hung over the main thoroughfare and garlanded the dark crested silhouettes of surrounding MU structures like a haunting wraith. Onward to the ramp leading to the nearby monorail platform, Desmond wondered too, about Abigail’s claims of resurrected family members from the remote past, and he began to wonder in what sense his life had been predestined, and the degree to which his free will was allowed to alter it for better or for ill.

  Aboard the monorail, Desmond tapped his palm and the stentorian voice of a mannequin faced ZEN news anchor blasted forth with the evening news alerts.

  “The trial of the accused in the tragic murder of three Columbia youths - Cassiopeia Craft – will begin tomorrow. This morning,” Desmond heard the grave intonation of the ZEN news correspondent, “the accused was brought before a tribunal led by a blue-ribbon presidential panel drawn from the ranks of the sustainability council led by Chief Sustainability Councilor Plato Charlemagne, who read out the charges. The array of charges spanned the gamut from kidnapping to murder and unsustainable behavior in the procuring of illegal weaponry and impersonating a praetorian trooper. Craft was a former gaming attendant employed at Columbia’s Paramount Games, one of the most popular such establishments in all Sky Parlor.”

  Desmond found himself peering closer at the holo-screen as he observed the ZEN news footage of the accused being led into the courtroom by armed praetorian troopers. Peering closer still, he felt a shudder in his brain that something may have been amiss, and as he recalled the dire warning of Chief Blythe after his frightful encounter with the intruder from the night of the presidential gala, he discovered himself stricken with a shimmer of an incipient notion that somehow, the indelible images of the praetorians, and the grave expressions of Plato Charlemagne accompanied by three sustainability councilors staring down at the accused from a raised dais while seated behind an enormous panel of black marble and varnished oak, seemed suspect, oddly surreal and artificial.

  What sort of political gambit was President Ulysses attempting, he wondered – had he deliberately endeavored to spread the virus of fear throughout Sky Parlor in the name of bolstering political power?

  Then, a tingle of amusement washed over Desmond as he witnessed both the mannequin-skinned news correspondent’s solemn expression and his somber tone modulate into those reflecting excited anticipation.

  Truly amazing, he pondered, and Desmond began to reflect upon his meeting with Marissa at the presidential palace; upon how technology had progressed to such an extent it was becoming exceedingly more difficult differentiating so-called breeders from that of saint models. And then another thought keened: If both were inhabited by a human bio-essence, an eternal soul that could be recycled, returning to this life again and again, generation after generation – as Abigail had alluded in his strange dream - did it ultimately matter, he considered further, if the container inhabited by the soul’s essence was artificial or organic?

  Thinking of Marissa again, and with a tinge of lingering doom, considering what Abigail said about the nature of the life she claimed he once led long ago, had he been smitten by what appeared to be the light from a true soul, though perhaps borne of the sun’s brilliance, shone through the imprisoning bars of a false heart?

  “In other news, tonight is the big city schoolboy championship football match between neighboring perennial rivals the Eagles of Columbia and the Rams of Arcadia before a lively and capacity crowd at Achilles Stadium on the campus of Columbia Sustainability Preparatory Academy. Thus far, it has proven to be a hard-fought match, with Arcadia holding on to a slim lead going into the fourth quarter. I understand we have Polly Trudeau on hand at the stadium tonight for a live update. Tell us Polly, will the Eagles, led by their star Bobby Lee Tepper, be able to finally pull out a victory and bring the schoolboy championship back to the citizens of Columbia in the final minutes of tonight’s contest?”

  “The muddy field here at Achilles stadium and the somewhat rainy conditions have slowed what have been potent offenses for both teams all season long and turned this fight for the city schoolboy championship of Sky Parlor into a defensive struggle,” Desmond heard the voice chime. “And here now, with just under three minutes remaining in the contest, the Rams of Arcadia are holding on to a slim two-point lead over the hometown Eagles of Columbia. The biggest surprise of the game thus far has been the performance of freshman placekicker Lucius Holden, who in addition to two long field goal conversions – one from fifty-two yards that nearly set a Sky Parlor schoolboy record – scored his first career touchdown as a varsity Eagle in the first quarter’s early going for Columbia after recovering a fumble at the Arcadia Ram’s goal line during the game’s opening kick-off.”

  As the swift monorail swept along the spiderwebbed networks of tracks perched high above the city, springing up from the ground in ferocious waves of blinding light, Desmond could see the stadium coming into view, which from a distance, gleamed like a behemoth pearl gauzed in spectral filaments of fog. The slender track drew parallel with the elevated passenger platform and as the sleek monorail unleashed a sterile hum and began to slow, Desmond activated zap-com on his holo-screen to Mister Tepper at the stadium who quickly appeared with a visual message indicating exactly where inside the stadium he was to be found. Gazing at the message, he watched his holo-screen whirl beneath the skin of his hand in a wild tornado of colors. Debarking with ginger steps to the concrete platform slicked with rainy mists, Desmond began to think about the girl who performed with Bobby Lee Tepper, observed in the recent video made nearly ubiquitous on Sky Parlor’s holo-web.

  Could it have been Abigail – the vivid spirit and mirthful seer who appeared to him during his waking dream and taken him on a journey across the unsustainable lands beyond the city’s walls – who was responsible for producing the trio of visions, that were rumored to have been the resurrected ghosts of Columbia Prep’s students? And was it possible the children had been kidnapped and murdered by Chief Blyth’s Praetorian Troopers upon orders from President Ulysses, and not by the accused attendant from Parliament Games as ZEN news claimed? Perhaps belonging to an even more sinister nature – what struck Desmond as a consideration beyond even the realm of the grotesque – could there be a connection to the recent information about Greenview related by Mister Tepper?

  Turning up the collar of his long cotton overcoat, Desmond found his way into the stadium. While the
tap of his methodical footsteps echoed off the condensation glistened walls of an arched passageway brimming with angelic lights, his senses became assaulted with a shrill whistle breaking through a chorus of bleating cheers. Emerging from the end of the passageway, he began ascending the tiered stadium steps to look for Mister Tepper. Another shrill whistle pierced the moist air, and as he turned to glance at the action on the field, he saw the hometown Eagles were making a valiant effort at defending their own goal line from another scoring surge advanced by their rivals from Arcadia. As the visiting Rams kept advancing the ball, and with less than two minutes remaining in the contest, Desmond sensed a wave of aching sorrow wash over Columbia stadium’s capacity crowd.

  “Dammit Bobby, we’re losing,” Loman bemoaned as an apprehensive lull seemed to linger over the entire stadium. “We can’t lose this one, this is the biggest game of our lives.”

  “What do we do Bobby?” Ken said. “We got to do something…we can’t let Arcadia score. We got to get the ball back.”

  “Huddle up, HUDDLE UP,” Bobby commanded his downcast teammates. “We’re not losing, dammit,” Bobby roared into the facemasks of his surrounding teammates. “You see that clock?” He struck a demonstrative finger toward the digital readout gleaming from the apex of the stadium. “There’s one minute and thirty seconds left yet…we’re a lifetime away here, so I don’t want to hear any more about damned losing, alright? Because it’s not happening, we’re Eagles, not losers.”

  “Time out, ref,” Coach Hammond bellowed to the head official standing behind Arcadia’s line of scrimmage, while Boudica and Lucius watched him pace the sidelines like a crazed panther.