The Trophy Wine

I went into the bedroom suite.

An hour ago I was ready to flake out totally, and just about anywhere. Now I was looking at the stainless steel kettle and there were caffeine desires swirling up inside me. Well okay I was a coffee addict.

The bed looked pretty inviting to lie on, no doubt about it. But you know, the thing that was in my brain, was no longer the tiredness factor at all – because that should have just taken over completely and switched my frontal thinking off and have the processes of sleep physiology let me drift into the generic oblivion of first phase sleep – it was literally the fact of all the poor people everywhere.

Somehow this had invaded my brain-space and was taking it over.

It was the also fact that I actually knew a few millionaires personally although no longer any billionaires ever since McAfee left the place. And that each and every one of those had absolutely zero impulse towards solving anything along the lines of general social poverty or even considering helping out a few individuals in material need. Not John though, not in his lifetime certainly -, he was pretty generous and thoughtful of others and never told many about that side of him. But I knew about it.

There was a knocking on the outer door of the living room and it was loud enough that I was able to hear it from inside the quiet bedroom with its connecting door slightly ajar. The living room area was quite large and so it still was a bit unexpected to so easily hear the knocking.

“Okay hang on, I’ll be there in a second.”

Who knows if they could hear me.

What was to wear? Seriously now, where were those things she had told me were ‘all arranged for me...’

She had said there were clothes here for me... I seem to recall she had said it.

Was that them over there, stacked neatly? Gee. What the heck was that all... There was pants and a top, sure but... Rough mousseline voile linen, ivory-coloured, literally drawstring pants! Top much the same kind of thing. But neither was rustic as such. Kind of just very well-made, to be honest. Too well-made to be rustic. And a wild, multi-coloured and mughal-design patterned Pashtush shawl. Vaguely was all a bit Bohemian and yet then again, not so; something much more modern.

Eventually I got to the front door and tested the handle and this time there was no problem, the thing was not locked.

And there stood whatsername, didn’t enough know it, standing right there. She obviously had some kind of key somewhere, might even have been a digital electronic one -, who knew...

And there were others with her.

Each and every one of them was wearing more or less the same kind of outfit that I now had on. The males had the coloured shawls around their shoulders and the women had them on as well. They were all frikkin’ barefooted.

Two people had bottles in their hand – the same thing that I had in my sling-bag, which... ...now, just where had I left that.

“Come in, guys.” I murmured. What else was I supposed to say?

One of the males raised a hand up to his eye area and pulled at something, looked like the skin at the outer side-slit of the eye, but in any event, he pulled out some kind of transparent eye-cover like a lens or something. And then I was able to look at his real eye – the pupil of it. It was ‘normal,’ but bright violet and piercing.

He had a little square of glittering material of some kind which he used to wipe the lens, and then he replaced the thing back over his eyeball, underneath the folds of skin around that.

“You worry about too much stuff, John.” This one said directly to me.

I shrugged. “So anyway, what are we doing?”