3.
Back to my apartment balcony, that morning, the week of ‘Songkarn Festival’ had just passed and my day off time was about to end. It was the morning that I had to go back to my precinct and faced the reality of my life as a low level civil servant. My boss, the inspector of the precinct, granted me a twenty-four hour off-duty time after Songkarn festival. Yes, a single day-off after a nonstop working for the whole goddamn week (What a lovely job I have got). My ongoing case investigations never allowed me to have my own private time more than one day. May I ask you, what you would do if you have only twenty-four hour off duty time from the week that you have to work eighteen hours a day, for everyday? Yes, me either, I slept all day long and woke up only for foods and restroom activities.
Before I could finish my first cigarette of the day at my balcony, the second alarm clock on my I-Phone jerked me back to the reality from my vivid reminiscence about the dream I had last night. It still lingered in my mind like a tattoo on my inner skin. The doctor’s medicine worked well for just only the first three nights but after that I was raided by that strange dream again. I looked at the time and I knew I needed to hurry. I was supposed to be on my precinct at zero six hundred for the morning briefing. Time is always against me, a metropolitan homicide detective. After the long hours of sleeping, the reality in front of me looked vaguely familiar to my eyes. As I remember, the time I went to bed last night was around nine o’clock in the evening, right after my single-man-do-it-myself dinner. But I did not know why I felt like I went out of this world far longer than that. I felt like I was still dreaming. I reckoned it must be because the doctor's medicine that I took it double doses last night to comply with his order.
‘ Pingg…’
My message notification alarm beeped again while I was walking back into my room from the balcony. I seized my phone up instinctively from the top of my television set without looking at it.
‘Thirty missed calls and fifty messages…’
‘What the hell…’ I exclaimed softly.
Now I knew I was really awake. This was a kind of damning evidence about the reality of my life. The people in my precinct could not really live without having me hanging around. All those fifty massages said the same thing about a murder case in the Kao San Road area last night. I rushed inside my bathroom and got myself ready to go out from my apartment within twenty minutes. I always hung my police uniform in front of my bathroom on the clothes-hanging place because it was the thing that I needed to put it on everyday. I hung my black windbreaker with the word ‘Detective’ screened on its backside by yellow fabric paint beside my apartment’s main entrance door. Ready now, I seized my jacket and briskly left my apartment. I did not know why I felt like my floor’s hallway was quieter and colder than usual.
‘Help me…’
On that dead silence of the hallway, I could hear a fainted human voice. The voice was very light, however, it was loud and clear enough for me to know that the voice belonged to a woman not a man. But the thing that piqued my curiosity the most was that I could feel some latent pain mixed in her voice. I stopped my footsteps instinctively and tried to listen to that voice more carefully. I just wanted to make sure that the source of the voice came from somewhere else rather than in my head. However, when I attentively tried to hear it, I could not hear anything but silence. So, I decided to move on to the elevator hall.
‘You’re a liar…’
Just only a few steps further, I could hear that voice again. This time it was louder. Now I was quite confident that the source of that mysterious voice definitely came from inside my head.
‘Maybe it’s time for me to see him again.’ I thought about my psychiatrist.
I forgot to tell you that I used to have a benign mental illness since I was born, the condition, which your psychiatrist would call it an OCD. After a long arduous and time consuming years of treatments, I decided to turn down the modern way of my mental health remedies and turned back to the oldest from of human inner self healing- a meditation. My mental condition was getting better and better since I started practicing some meditation. But there was still some remnant of those old days illness manifested its symptoms on my daily behavior until today. What can I say? I do not like crowded spaces, unfamiliar places or any swiftly change of any particular situations. I hated to become people focal point. But the thing that caused me troubles the most was when I was standing among other people. My eyes always move uncontrollably around to observe all the things nearby. Something like, inside people handbags, costume textures, skin colors, details of people limbs like hands like feet, hair and everything that caught my attention. It always ended up with a displeasing or reprimanding looking back from those people around me. I knew they might have thought that I have got nosy eyes or something like that. But deep inside my heart, I considered all those symptoms as a gift from god. Why? Because those symptoms always helped me to become a perfect observer of the crime scene when I was inspecting it. It is a unique quality that every homicide detective like me yearns to have. I call it, a natural sense of inquisitiveness. All right, it is nosiness as many civilians may call.
Nevertheless, that morning, at my very hallway, without any warning, the manifestation of a new symptom began inside me. I did not understand why it could happen now because I just came back from the consulting with my psychiatrist about my annoying dream just a week ago. For now, I presumed that it might have something to do with the new medication that my doctor friend gave me. I knew I must find a time to see him again as fast as possible. Hearing a voice talking to you from inside your head was definitely not a good sign. I suddenly had an apprehensive feeling about tomorrow, what would be happening next. My evil mind abruptly had a picture of the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’ emerged inside it. However, for the time being, that voice did not annoy or irritate me just yet. It just happened when I was completely alone in some very quiet circumstance, like in this hallway of my apartment floor.
Oh, talking about a woman, I almost forget to share with you about the girl in my dream that I have already mentioned her before. She appeared in my dream for almost two weeks now. She was the reason why I had to go back to see my psychiatrist after a long while of absenting from meeting with him regarded my OCD conditions. However, after I took the new medication, which the doctor gave me, the dream disappeared from my life for a few days. But it was last night that she… I mean, the girl from my dream, came back to visit again. She was not a dazzling beautiful girl but I have to admit that she had some strange seductive personality with an intense sex appeal. This had not yet included her hard to resist mesmerizing eyes. Her face still vividly lingered somewhere in the circle of my thoughts. Then again, in those blazing eyes, there was some perceivably dormant sadness mingled with their beauty. It was the feeling beyond my caliber to fathom at the time.
In the dream, we (I and her) were lying together on our bed and having a zestful conversation. And after that, a kiss, she kissed me like she never kissed any male human being for a long time. I had to admit that, it was a lust-provoking kiss. And only I think about it now, I have to shake my head very hard to dispel those titillated feeling out of my mind. Yes, I really do crave for that feeling once more sometime. After one of the hottest kisses in my life, she ripped her blouse buttons off and leaned back against the bed backrest. With her bare honey color skin and naked breasts, her gesture, it clearly showed that she was ready to be punished by a bittersweet pain. The last thing I remembered from that dream was an utterly painful and terrifying screaming of a woman, then followed by an intense smells of human urine mingled with feces. For me, the last part of my dream was quite an eerie business because I used to remember someone told me that you could not smell anything both fragrant or stench in your dream. But after many times of recalling my memories, I was quite confident that, I could really smell those stenches. I also have an absurd feeling that the smells still adhere in my nostrils until now when I am telling you this story. The missing part of my dream was still nagging on my mind and I did not know why I wanted to remember it so much. But it was like an arbitrary feeling that happened to me. But no matter how hard I tried to dig those memories up, my attempt seemed to be fruitless. My mind still kept thinking about the missing part of my dream along the way that I was walking to my precinct on this very morning.
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