Victor’s Stain
By Cooper Baltis
Published January 4th 2012 in the Wednesday edition of the UB Post
“Oh it’s just a small stain,” Victor said, glimpsing down at the tiny red blotch opposite the cufflink on his left wrist.
He glanced at himself one last time in the mirror, smoothed his hands through his hair, adjusted the collar on his shirt, and made sure his tie was just a little loose to appear as if he didn’t care. He fixed the bottom of his shirt, tucked into his dark blue Simon Spurr jeans and held tightly by a thick Brioni belt. He grabbed his glass of wine and carefully opened the restroom door.
His home, a recently built condominium overlooking Central Park, was filled with lively guests and coworkers. The company he worked for, CDO Limitless, had just posted an unheard of quarterly profit gain and it was Victor’s turn to host the party. It was September 2008 in New York and the streets below were finally starting to cool down. Inside his apartment, people hovered around an elaborate cheese and wine set up fluttering their socialite wings.
“Here’s to us!” Jeff said, running past him and sloppily toasting his wine glass against Victor’s. The wine from Jeff’s glass sloshed onto Victor’s shiny lacewood floor. “Sorry about that buddy,” he said, wiping a bit of cracker off his fat lip. “At least it won’t stain!”
Victor gave Jeff a small, curt smile as Jeff pushed past him into the bathroom. Jeff, a North Carolina native, had yet to figure out how to hold his alcohol. Victor secretly despised him. He looked down at the stain on his cufflink and noticed it had spread a little.
“How is this possible?” he said, setting his wineglass down on a small nightstand he had ordered from Asambienti. As he examined the stain, Sarah, one of the fiercest analysts he had ever met, scooted next to him and whispered something into his ear. “What?” he asked.
“Do you want me to fill your glass?” she asked louder this time, steadying her gaze on Victor.
“Do you see this stain?” Victor asked, still shocked at his own clumsiness.
“Oh it’s so small Victor, don’t worry. Here, let me fill up your glass,” Sarah, wild eyed and with a slight snarl on her face, bent forward to fill Victor’s glass. “Forget the stain. Just have fun.”
“It just appeared…” Victor said, scratching the stain with his fingernails.
“How did it happen?” Sarah asked, checking her Blackberry and smiling at a text message she had received. She chuckled and stuffed the phone back in her cerulean blue Herme’s purse with off-white stitching.
“One minute I was standing in the restroom, the next minute I noticed the stain,” Victor thrust his wrist forward to show her. “I’m quite sure I didn’t cause it. I think it’s spreading.”
Indeed the stain was spreading. It had made its way from the tip of the cuff past his wrist now. Sarah examined the stain curiously as she sipped from her glass of wine. She took Victor’s wrist in her hand like a mother examining an injured child. She turned the wrist over as she took another sip from her glass.
“It is spreading. Strange,” she said, dropping his wrist.
“Have you ever seen a stain do this?” he asked, watching as the red stain quickly spread to his forearm.
“I’m sure it’s happened before, stains have a way of trickling down.”
“Maybe I should change shirts,” Victor said as Jeff exited the bathroom behind him.
“Looks like you got yourself a spill there, buddy,” Jeff said, patting Victor hard on the back.
“Please don’t call me buddy,” Victor said, disgusted at the stain and at Jeff.
“No worries ol’ Vic,” Jeff laughed and slapped Victor on the back again. “Say, is your stain spreadin’?”
“I don’t know,” Victor said, crossing his arms in front of his chest.
“Looks like it to me,” Sarah said as she pulled her Blackberry out of her purse.
“No use cryin’ over spilt milk. Just go and change your shirt,” Jeff said, burping.
“I think I’ll do that,” Victor said, frowning and turning towards his bedroom. After shutting the door, Victor looked disgustedly at the red stain in the mirror. He hated the stain. It had spread to his chest and tie. The shirt must be cursed, he thought, taking off his cufflinks and flinging his shirt into a bamboo clothes hamper.
He pulled out another shirt from his closet and removed the plastic dry cleaning sheet that had been carefully draped over it. Staring at his reflection in the mirror, he began to button the shirt. It was light green Borrelli shirt with tangerine stitching. He went back to his closet and found a thin checkered tie to go with it. He affixed the tie, making sure that its tip hung to his belt, and tucked in his shirt.
“Better,” he said aloud. Just to reassure himself, he looked back at the cuff where the stain had been on the original shirt.
Sure enough, the stain had spread to his new shirt.
“Impossible!” He yelled, rushing to his closet and grabbing a random shirt. It too had stains on the cuff.
“What’s happening?” Sarah asked, opening the door slightly and jiggling the wine glass in her hand. As she closed the door, the din from the party in his living room diminished.
“I can’t…it’s not possible. Someone is playing a prank on me,” Victor said, unbuttoning the green shirt.
“The stain…it is on all my shirts. Look!” he led Sarah around to his closet and began pulling out the shirts. “This one, this one, this one, this one…”
“Oh wow,” Sarah set her wineglass down on his mahogany armoire. “They are all spreading too…”
“What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know, but it’s spreading to the floor now,” Sarah stepped back as the red stain spread from the cuffs of Victor’s shirts to a puddle on the floor. The look on her face changed from one of mild amusement to shock.
Victor and Sarah watched as the stain spread from the closet, past their shoes and under the door. They heard someone slip on the stain outside the door. More bodies started to fall in the living room as the stain breached those hallowed grounds, each thud vibrating the floor. Victor watched in horror as the stain crawled up his shiny Bellò shoes to the legs of his pants. He touched his jeans and watched as the stain spread to the tips of his finger. Sarah screamed as the stain spread from her heels to her Hermes purse.
The stain quickly metastasized from Victor’s posh apartment overlooking Central Park. Through the coffee shops, high end clothing boutiques, pubs, the carts of street side food venders, spreading left and right, through the Wall Street financial district, to the Jersey shore, spreading north and south, into the water nearby, across the Atlantic, through the aged stones of the Tower of London, to the European mainland, climbing the Eiffel Tower, into the cerulean waters of the Rhine, over the Alps, past the Coliseum and the cobble stoned streets of Greece, into the Dead Sea, spinning around the Dome of the Rock, up to the elaborate cathedrals of St. Petersburg, through the crumbled buildings of Baghdad, to the tip of the Pyramids, across the Horn of South Africa, through the Indian Ocean, to the peaks of the Himalayas, north to the Great Wall, across the steppe, back down over the Potala, down the Ganges River as holy men bathed, through the wheels of rickshaws on their way to the Taj Mahal, spreading east into the Mekong, passing a fisherman on a long boat wearing a thatched hat and smoking a yellow cigarette, across the crisp green rice paddies of Thailand, through the dazzling streets of Tokyo, over the Sydney Opera House, across the Pacific and its myriad islands, through the vast Canadian countryside, south through the plains and farms of North America, west through the hills of Hollywood, past the Pyramid of the Sun and Moon in Mexico, down the crests of the Andes, swimming with piranhas through Amazon, under the widespread concrete arms of the Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro, back into the Atlantic on the tailfin of a killer whale.
Victor’s stain spread far and wide. Victor’s stain spread far and wide.
