A Mattress of Many Smells

Posted on Sun 9th Aug, 2020 @ 9:46am by Yuliette Marayan Dr. & Radak

1,246 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Resolution
Location: Brown Sector: Zodiac
Timeline: MD 12

Radak made his way back up to the Zodiac, climbing the steps up the flight of steps leading to Neone’s apartment. As he did, he wondered idly if that was her real name. He had no reason to doubt her, but then a lot of people who end up in Brown Sector were hiding from something or somebody. It wasn’t as if Radak was the name he was born with, either.

It was something Kainon always told him. People come to Brown Sector because their old lives didn’t work so well. This was where you went to get a fresh start. You were down here, but you weren’t out, and you could still make a good life for yourself. There were plenty of good people here. Plenty of bad ones, too, but he believed the same as Kainon did that the good outweighed the bad.

His instincts told him that Neone was one of the good ones. He stopped outside her door and gave a knock, and so she wouldn’t worry, said, “It’s Radak, Ms. Neone. About the mattress.”

The latches switched and then she peeked through. "Hi." She gave the door a little force to get it past that weird spot it always caught on. "Sorry. It sticks." Yuliette moved to the side to let him in, biting her lip. She'd gone to town scrubbing the place all morning, but the chemicals had since dissipated, still leaving the rotten smell. She looked away as Radak stepped inside. There were no excuses she could make about the place. It really was just that awful. "Sorry." She said again.

"It's..." She pointed to the obvious. The mattress was half in the room, and half out on the balcony, covered with the plastic she'd used as a sheet. Nearby were the long cushions she had just gotten from the shop that she intended to repose on instead. A rusty crate held a stack of library books about Bajor and Bajorans. She had an overnight bag on the floor, and her satchel on the nail in the wall. Her groceries were chilling on a bucket of ice on the tile floor in the door-less bathroom with the rusted out shower head. There wasn't much else to see in the place, except the view of the Zodiac from the balcony.

The smell was certainly pungent, Radak had to give her that. “This isn’t a bad place,” Radak said. “First place I lived in when I got to Brown Sector was a section of Jeffries’ Tube that I could defend.” He pulled the mattress back inside and knelt down as he wrapped it in the plastic. “You looking for work yet?” He asked.

"I'm trying to figure it out. I..." She pursed her lips sideways, trying to figure what she could say to a sheriff's deputy. But if he'd lived in a Jeffries tube for starters? Maybe he wasn't likely to rush her to an airlock. "I um... I don't know what to do. I'm specialized in a field I can't use now. I don't really have a lot of other skills." She worked her fingers back and forth between one another, nervously. Was that too vague? Or not vague enough? "Someone offered me a job, but I couldn't... tell him anything he wanted to know about me. And his business wasn't something I know anything about, either." Then she shook herself out of all that baleful sounding talk. "But I have some ideas. I just have to figure out some starting funds."

“Brown Sector is a good place for figuring out what you’re gonna do next.” He finished wrapping the smelly mattress and picked it up, hefting it easily up on his shoulder. “What is it that you like to do? Like hobbies? That’s how I started out fixing things around here. I was always good with my hands. Started to make a little living with it.”

Yuliette froze in place a moment to appreciate that feat. "Damn." It had taken all of her effort just to drag the thing a few feet from its original placement.

Radak gave a small smile and stepped out the door, ducking down low to get the mattress under the door frame.

"Oh, right, hobbies. Well, that's what I was thinking." Yuliette followed Radak into the hall, locking up behind her. She brightened as she explained. "If I could get a few little pieces of equipment, just like a burner and some pots and jars and things, I know how to make first aid remedies and balms, things of that nature. I don't know if there's rules here about packaging and labeling or whatever. There doesn't seem to be a lot of rules, anyway."

Radak smiled a little bit wider, which was to say it was a slightly more noticeable quirk of the mouth. “One thing you don’t have to worry about down here is market branding. As long as whatever you make doesn’t make people sick or kill anybody, you won’t have any problems.” He walked down the stairs with the mattress on his shoulder. “You know medicine?”

"Enough to make hand lotion, anti fungal powder, and tooth mineralizers. I mean, anyone with net access could figure that out. It's not exactly thoracic surgery." She tried to play it down as she followed him.

“What’s thoracic surgery?” He asked, taking her down a twisty path of narrow corridors between little handmade structures.

"You know—" She turned a corner, marveling. This was one of those cut-throughs of the Zodiac she'd seen others taking but hadn't been brave enough to try herself. She hurried forward to keep up with his strides and avoid getting separated."Open heart surgery. It's not open heart surgery."

Radak nodded at that. “Thoracic surgery. Okay.” They walked along and the environment became more functional, more like the abandoned section of a Starbase that it actually was. There was trash strewn about, however, and Radak navigated it carefully. “So you don’t want to be a doctor, anymore?”

"It doesn't matter what I want." Yuliette rubbed her forehead and swallowed, speaking low as she stepped around things. She realized she'd made a hackneyed mess of an attempt at small talk and been seen right through by a blind guy. "I can't be a doctor anymore. They didn't make the plaques out to 'Neone'."

Radak nodded. “That does present problems,” he mused. “Most people who come here, they’re avoiding what they used to do. Who they used to be. Something.” He stopped outside a heavy door and punched a button. The door swung open, revealing an airlock compartment half-full of trash. He tossed the mattress inside. “Some people here figure out a way to be happy. Some people don’t. I hope you’re the first kind of people.”

Yuliette's fingers crushed the paper in her pocket with the list of destinations far from this place as she looked up into Radak's reflective lenses. "Well, at least I know where to take my trash now. That's a start on the road to happiness, right?"

“It’s better than living in it,” he said, shutting the door again. “Trash, I mean. Living in happiness is okay.”

"I guess. If it's real happiness. Not some kind of facade." For a moment she paused, looking past Radak, through the airlock glass at the little view of a starry sky beyond.

...(tbc)

 

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