Lord of the Two Lands, Part 1

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Part 5

He was in a bar this time.  Never used to such surroundings, he'd been told such places were dens of iniquity and ill repute.  But after everything he'd seen and been through, he now knew the world wasn't as black and white as he once thought.  He nursed his beer for over half an hour.  He never liked beer until the last few years.  He grew an appreciation for the drink, though.  And he was able to distinguish between the different brands.  Ultimately, he was drinking because he figured beer was a social currency.  Others would see him with it and feel comfortable.  They'd let their guard down and relax.  He desperately needed someone to open up to him.

But how does a man open himself back up to the world once he was cut off from it?  If a man goes off to war, gets lost, and doesn't come home for years, how does he adjust?  Or if a child is locked up in a closet and kept locked away in an attic for a long time, but is suddenly let free, will he ever grow up to be a normal, successful man?  And what about a man thrown away in prison?  Prisons are nothing more than modern dungeons these days.  They were sometimes called penitentiary systems, but there was nothing penitential about them.  How impossible is it for Edmond Dantès to become the Count of Monte Cristo?

He couldn't lift his eyes above the bar he sat at.  He'd always caught himself looking down, lost in thought.  The murmur of the bar was a white noise he easily tuned out.  Nothing anyone talked about mattered to him.  He was estranged.  Alien.  He didn't belong there.  Someone put on some country music.  It was modern, self-aware, and obnoxious.  He hated it.  A woman who looked ten years older than him had been glancing at him, but he never met her eyes.  He didn't know what to do anymore.  The bartender tried cheering him up with one-liners and perky follow-ups.  All he could do is bring himself to smile for a few moments before sinking back down into himself.  This wasn't working.  A group came in behind him.  They were young bar hoppers, halfway stoned, and very loud.

He paid and left.  There was too much to do, and he was out of time.  It was foolish to try this.  There was no one he could open up to.  He'd reached a place in life where no one could help him.  He tried other avenues of opening up to people.  He went to an ice cream social at a nearby church.  He tried a coffee shop.  He tried playing some volleyball with another group of people who, apart from his presence in the game, wouldn't have anything to do with him.  He was a pariah.  He was too far gone.  He'd gone so far with it all, that there was no one left who could relate to what he'd been through.  He could try to get on the internet and meet people in that manner, sure.  The World Wide Web had come a long way since he first left the world.  People were now more interconnected than ever.  But it'd take time to learn the ins and outs of all the new social media and other new websites.  Besides, he was dealing with concrete problems in the real world, and there was too much danger of retreating into a safe, lazy existence of attention-seeking if he played with the Internet.  Not to mention the fact that everyone was piddling around on the Internet on their phones and tablets as it was, divorced from the reality that surged around them.

No, he had a mission tonight.  The play in the park would start at seven in the evening, and it would last beyond nightfall.  He had to be there.  The man he was tracking---if you could call him a man---was the main financier of this particular event.  This patron of the arts loved this special play.  It was to be a rare performance of John Milton's Comus, the story of a sorcerer who could transform people into animals after tricking them to drink from his magical cup.

Of course he'd set up something like this, he thought to himself.  And then he wondered how many high-brow rich people would disappear before dawn.