Via Dolorosa Read Online Free PDF

himself from the bed and crept over to the patio doors. Peeling back the sheer curtain, he could see the world outside still dark and gray and monochromatic. The tallest of the courtyard palms were bowed over in the strong wind, their leaves whipping frantically, bullied, stripped and shiny and slick with rain. He managed to prop open the doors, just slightly, and finagled a cigarette and lighter from the pocket of his shirt, which was draped over the back of a desk chair. A flick of his lighter coaxed a blue flame. He smoked, shirtless, exhaling through the slight opening in the doors, and it felt good. The shock of the freezing cold air made his nostrils burn. His right hand shook when he held the cigarette, and it made him not want to look at it, not want to think about anything in particular, anything at all. He was glad, in some strange and melancholy way, that Emma had awakened early and was not in the room with him now. He could still smell her presence, though, like the cold tendrils of a passing ghost through his body, and he suddenly knew it did not matter if she were here or not because, on some level and in some way, she would always be here, and she would continue to pass through him like a ghost. There was no changing that, no escaping any of it.
    Some goddamn world we live in, he thought, when even the saddest ghosts are spitefully relentless.
    “You’re a dumb son of a bitch,” he told himself casually, tossed the cigarette out the crack in the door and into the storm, closed the patio doors, and made his way to the bathroom.
    He showered for a long time, the water hot and pleasant on his tired skin. He dressed in black corduroys freckled with paint and a threadbare pullover. Then he went to a large clapboard trunk that was pressed up against one wall and opened it. Inside were crusted tubs of paint, gouaches, gums, brushes, an old Richeson wood palette, oil bars, painting knives, solvents, and hard, crusted rags. There were stacks of sketchpads, too, and he did not need to open them and flip through their pages to know what was inside them. Nor did he open them now but, rather, knelt before the clapboard trunk and ran his hands over their covers and examined them with only his eyes and his fingers, but tried hard to ignore them with his deeper senses. Their covers were worn, faded, pitted, gored by forgotten dirt pellets and scratched by ancient sand. He had filled the pages of those sketchpads back during a different time in his life. In a way, it had been both a more complex time and a simpler time, although he was not quite sure how that could be or even how he came to understand such a thing. He had sketched them wholly and freely and undaunted, unlike how he had sketched the hotel mural for the past two weeks. The mural was different, requiring intense concentration and much deliberation. He was a different person now, it seemed. And he could only work a few hours before the lousy Raynaud’s set in, and he’d have to stop and wait and think and do nothing else but wait and think. It had never been that way before. It was a new process to him. Process, he thought again, turning the damnable word over and over in his head but too ashamed to speak it aloud. There it is again, that lousy word. And he could not look at the sketchpads without thinking of how he used to be and, sadly, how he was now. He knew that if he bent down and smelled the sketchpads they would smell like the desert. They would smell like Iraq. And thinking this made him think of the bell captain from last night, half drunk and nostalgic and full of self pity.
    Get off it, he thought. Everyone feels sorry for themselves. It’s the way of the world. Who would we be if we didn’t feel sorry for ourselves?
    Still, he did not like to think of the bell captain.
    Closing the trunk, he stood and stretched his back until it popped, and realized he was hungry.
    Downstairs, he crossed the lobby. The Palauan conch peddler who, for the duration