CoffeeShop Blues: 2015 Traveler's Edition | Page 41

Jeremy Frost chair rocked back and you could recline in it, thus it served the purpose of a bed too. The room was pretty bare. The only other object was a computer, circa nineteen-eighty something, sitting atop a very stark chair and desk. It continued the theme of the design, the captivity aesthetic boasted by the exterior of the building had been carried into the interior expertly. It brought the outside in. At least the design theme was consistent. “Do you want a bath?” Fedor lazily queried. “That would be incredible”. It would be. “Oh. That is going to be a problem. I don’t have any hot water, but I can heat some in a pot. I never use the bath”. “That would be great”. I smiled. I had been chilled on the way over. The thought of any type of warm bath thrilled me. Over the next twenty minutes, Fidel heated water in a small pot over a single flame gas burner. I ferried it to the bath when it had reached a boiling point. The low bulbs gave the feeling that we were living in the last light cast at the end of a battery powered torches life; you know when it begins to give up the ghost and the beam wanes to a pathetic, orange glow where once it had been blindingly stark, white and bright. It was an unhealthy, anemic illumination that highlighted, or more accurately low-lighted, the stark sterility of poverty. There was little conversation between me and Fedor. He slowly sipped from a bottle of red wine and continued with deep fascination the apparently mesmerizing business of heating the water. “I do not usually have people over”. He philosophically confessed, staring off into the distance for a second, before returning his gaze back to that single, hypnotic flame. Having secured a poor excuse for a bath, a good couple of inches of hot water, I excitedly took off my clothes, lowered myself into the shallows and began to