The Architect’s Elusive Gold

A Story by Deco

A novel in progress.

Chapter 1

Sate. Satisfied to the full, he sat reclined resting his stubby hands, interlocked at the fingers, just below his bare, ballooned navel. His silken robe had given way to his bulging belly, plopped beneath a twinkling glint in his pale, silvern eyes above an unbothered smile which contorted abject satiation.
All the time in the world now to have given his mind free roam. There would have been a certain thing which, among the many feats it operates, only the mind does, to be done. Moments recently savored to be solely intimated, surrendered to. Nostalgia, in effect, and the savor of all its little curios. But, not that evening. His brows seamed atop the smile his lips flourished. His pronounced dimples inflated. Just as soon, his smile faded.
His big, leisurely apt brain would be doing something a smidge more unsavory at that sacred hour. Thoughts to be thunk. Today, indeed, there would be more, he knew. He felt them swell like, well.., “refinement” giving itself reward, as he’d at once imagined and felt them as a seeming flock of starlings flitting across his cerebellum in a whirl.
He unlocked those hands of his and lifted one of them towards his head, caressing the right side of his chubby face with the back of the hand. Then “swiftly”, he placed the index and middle finger directly at his temple. He shifted his weight slightly onto that hand which he rested at the elbow onto the arm of the massive Oud Adagio in which he sat. Unlike the reminiscent kind of Savarinian sacrosanctity which should have been due, one of those things bland “thinking” produces had instead made itself exigent among the many.
Hell, it�"though, as if�"needed accept being a thing other than that which memory produces and nothing more, if he could help it. Unfortunately…he knew better. It was alas recollection doing that thing it aptly does precisely when one does not want it to. And slowly, surely it swallowed every other rattling between his ears like the coming and going’s of whichever emergency vehicle�"annoyingly making known as they aptly do�"he frequently heard across the bay. Always at the smallest and most inconvenient of times as this resurgent, mental invader was at once punctual.
The utterance from that ridiculous individual did bother him a little. Very, very much a little. Extremely a little. And now he was wholly preoccupied with making sense of it at all.
“And to think that man had been here in my home,” he said softly to himself. How could such a man have said something so incredibly unrefined?
“How laughable is he?”
With those fingers of his still holding up his head, he lifted his eyes and began to survey his dining room. Mostly the now empty dining chairs lining the sides of the massive table. Six left. Six right. Another adagio nestled at the far end. Then the table it self.
Three vases: ebony, bearing intricate joinery, sat in line dead center cradling bromeliad, and each held a different specie. His eyes soon settled on the vase, nestled farthest away from him, which sat cradling Guzmania. This specie was most common of all such bromeliads; ordinary, usual though not without a kind of beauty. He scoffed and rolled his eyes. The ordinary, commonplace and uninteresting as it was, did have its place, after all. A place where it could be readily found and pointed to as precisely stale.
Much unlike the Ananas held in the vase closest to him. He found a certain kind of irony in the placement of the flower-filled vases. It would have been somewhat appropriate that the vase closest to him had been placed where the farthest was placed. After all, the foliage of the Ananas bore a kind of architectural flair. And yet, he began to intricate, the existing way of things was equally, no, most appropriate. The only interesting thing about common was that it was commonplace; common does as common is. A common man will always let known of his ordinariness. If not in doing, he will say.
He had come to it at last. No need to, as if, continue the kind of drilling into his temple. He lowered his hand, reached out and caressed the miniature, non-edible pineapples atop the Ananas’s flower spike. He smiled, gladdened the vase was here, and not there.
That man had been sat there, in close company to the common Guzmania, the bridge of his common nose holding up black, horned-rim glasses�"as if. Hein Jela Montpellier, the architect. He’d come bearing blueprints, the final blueprints of the chateau the man had commissioned to be built in the countryside of the city state.
The man, for a moment, looked up at the ceiling which brandished glass panes, spanning the length and width of the dining table, inadvertently keeping at bay the world beyond, though duly allowing its fading, natural light passage. The flowers had indeed, always received their fill of sunlight where they were. He lifted his hand from the sprouted pineapples of the Ananas and placed it onto the vase, palm on its side and his thumb resting on the lip. He tapped it gently�"the sort of thing ‘well done’ elicits. The Ananas had, the others, too, achieved its immaculate form, perhaps maturity, as was due; much to the pride of whatever God wherever, and he had a hand in that, on a separate hand, too. On the main hand? Well, there. There was the matter of the feature in the ceiling onto which he had focused his gaze. It had been much later, perhaps a fortnight removed from their initial meeting, to the day, that he had made known that he wanted this feature added to the plans of the chateau.
The architect’s immediate reaction had been one of seeming confusion at first. Sooner yet, he had begun to perform annoyance; the request was seemingly an imposition. This would have to be removed completely, that would need to be re-arranged, and this re-arrangement would affect the structure this way and that way and that meant more time to completion. But most crucially, the man soon began to realize as he harkened to that ridiculous man’s performance of those apprehensions,�"near frantic movements of his hands and an incessant adjustment of his eye ware�"the budget would need to be raised. Yet, for whatever reason, the architect wouldn’t admit that.
In the present moment, he pulled back his hand from the vase, adjusted his robe and put his bare belly away beneath his robe. He returned his gaze to the chair at the far end of the table once more. The architect had been sat there during their meeting. He imagined the man sitting there now. His jaws cinched. He clinched both of those fat-ladened hands of his into a fist, in a sweeping motion leaned forward and subtly banged the tabletop with the side of those closed fists.
There was everything of a certain thing in the world to be said about a man who couldn’t effectively express himself. A man who couldn’t, no, wouldn’t expressly make himself known. This meant that whatever he did say was immediately fodder for scrutiny. He could not be trusted. That was the ultimate goal of deliberate omission.
“I should hurl the damn vase at you, shouldn’t I?” He said softly, imagining the man presently sitting there now. He grated his teeth within, again, cinched jaws, and leaned further forward, as if to engage, as if, against his better judgment, the man had been sat in front of him. The belly resisted a little against the edge of the table. To that, he planted his feet onto the parquet, and with a subtle thrust of his hips pushed the adagio holding him up back a little. He sighed…Unlike the present moment,�"the crux of his gripe immaculately immaterial therein as it was�"during that meeting he had been sat much closer to the man, but, moreover, only that his reaction then had been pale compared to what he knew was presently brewing.
His lips revealed his pristine, cleft teeth beneath a wry smile. There was hypocrisy in that. It was plausible to him that anything to be expressed in the present moment, should have been expressed then. Rife all the time then, as the present moment, with his particular kind of scrutiny.
He sighed again, pulled back his hands and placed both his palms on opposite cheeks. Silently, he said to himself, “forgive me, Cichy. I do know better, don’t I? I can do better. I must.”
However, his lack of forthrightness in that moment passed had been due to a certain kind of shock at the architect’s apprehensions performed during their meeting, and not for omission’s sake towards the ends of a wile…which he hadn’t suspected of the man until now.
Then, he had been at the mercy of the shock felt long enough before asking at last: “Well, Montpellier, you can’t afore anymore than the time it will take to complete the project, is that it?” That was, perhaps, a reasonable objection to have. Montpellier was an architect after all, not a builder, surely there needed to be a certain kind of consideration for the time of those who would be doing the labor.
“Well,” the architect had replied adjusting his glasses, “that is not a problem at all.”
“No?”
“No, it shouldn’t be.”
“Then what is it, Montpellier?”
“Well, Mr. Or, we’ve had to adjust,” the architect seemed to stress the word, “the budget twice already, haven’t we?”
“And my approval on those occasions are indications of certain disapproval now?”
“Oh, forgive me. I just meant to say�"”
“That the issue is money,” Cichy interjected. “Is that all?”
The moment following this question, Cichy recalled, was perhaps more interesting than any before it. Montpellier had simply fallen silent for a time. Then he advertised an “easygoing” smile. He did whatever that was�"subtly pushing the right nostril shut, and then flicking�"atop his nose with his hand. He adjusted his glasses for the millionth time and lowered his gaze onto the blueprints settled on the table. When he looked up again, Cichy noticed a certain adjustment in those heterochromatic eyes of his. Equal parts irritation and resignation, batting something like: to hell with it. I’ll just come out and say it. No need for keeping up appearances anymore, is there? Likewise, when Montpellier spoke again, the unrefined utterance found it’s way into the air, at last invading the mental plane which it held captive now.
“Well, money, Mr. Or. This is all that matters in this world, isn’t it? Isn’t that it?”
That statement of his was evermore the corroboration of the conclusion Cichy had made earlier about the architect. On the face of it, the implication it proposed was ridiculous enough, as it was to unveiled a certain kind of ordinariness wearing down the one from whom it came. More yet, it was an inversion onto itself, conveyed to precisely conceal what it meant.
A meaning, of the two, no, few, the statement carried, which he had probably hoped Cichy did received was that he, Cichy Balleneaux Or, was precisely the kind of man who took every chance he could to flaunt the fact that money was no obstacle in life�"by extension, ‘all that matters in this world.’ A shallow man who saw his worth only in his material possessions, but in his unlimited ability to accrue more, and more.
The statement itself, as expressed, was a veil for, more yet, at least one other; a kind of prolepsis in effect, Cichy suspected, from which the “figurative” condition of a psychological prolapse seemed to insist upon itself as manifest. He chuckled.
Whereby, for now, it didn’t matter what the end of Montpellier’s game could possibly have been. If his suspicion was valid, then that endgame would reveal itself as is always the case in such instances.
Cichy laughed. No man worth his salt would conceive such a statement, but believe it to be true as it seemed Montpellier had done, let alone say it out loud. On the face of it, or else broadly put, it would be ridiculous to, say, in the same breath accuse a complainant of the accusation he or she actively makes, wouldn’t it?
“An ordinary man indeed,” Cichy said with a certain assurance, the jitters of excitement bubbling beneath it. Most people, in their ordinariness, are hiding in plain sight after all, to the extent that this was true of Montpellier, because. After all, “most people” did not account for all. Nonetheless, that possibility otherwise being just as probable,�"it admittedly was�"the fact of a disguise hinted, always hints, and hints; is always a revealing daring to extricate itself. Likewise, and precisely because of it all, Montpellier at last gave privy to a certain kind of sophistication he possessed. He did. Even if it had been somewhat crude.
There was something to admire, from a purely objective vantage. Cichy, again, contorted his lips with a smile.
For a moment Cichy found himself in a rather strange revelry. The crux of his annoyance that evening had ignited a fire in him he hadn’t felt in a long while. All of those implications of Montpellier’s statement, a few of which he was sure he’d already excavated, and those yet to be exhumed, swayed atop, began to meld with his logical palate like the ratatouille he’d had for dinner not so long before. This blending, he was sure, would bring him the delicacy of an exercise of logic: of extrapolatory speculation and the savor of reasoning. Towards Montpellier’s proposed challenge, as he saw it. Towards Montpellier’s game.
He smiled, and lifted his hands to his face, covering each of his cheeks in a hand. Anticipation grew. Just as soon, he lowered both hands onto the surface of the table, pushing slightly downward as he began to rise.
“What else in the world could you be doing now, Cichy?” He checked the time piece constricting his left wrist. Genuine enough as the manner of a gastronome and all its, now psychic, delights was, this was an imminently better endeavor.
“Jouons alors, Montpellier, jouons.”