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hearts with one purpose alone.
I.
John has left pieces of himself, diffuse, shattered, across a city that has lost all its luster (a hole through a window at an art college in the docklands; heartbeats lost to a bomb that did not go off at a swimming pool in Ealing; a phone call from the rooftop of Barts, and all the other things, besides).
Suppression is easy. Painless, perhaps.
.:.
They are sitting at the kitchen table. John is drinking tea and Sherlock is not. It seems like everything else, everything outside, is collapsing. Here they are fine. Here they are safe.
"I have to go out,” Sherlock says. “Don't touch the experiment in the fridge.”
John shakes his head. “You look tired. You should stay in.”
“I can't. You know I can't.”
John says nothing. Sherlock regards him, limned with something sharp, terrible. It hurts to look at him. John blinks, hard.
When he opens his eyes, the morning sun shines in so brightly he has to turn away. The horrible keening noise comes from his own throat, has to, because there is no one, no one else. He presses the back of his hand to his mouth.
He barely makes it to the bathroom before he is sick.
(It all feels so paper-thin, fragile, so easy to destroy.)
.:.
On the fourth morning after, he awakes in the middle of a dream: of digging down into that newly-turned earth until he feels warmth again, radiating from a body that could be no other body but his, from a body that could be nothing else but alive. But that would be too fitting, too much like something beautiful.
On the seventeenth day, John stops searching for closure in the empty spaces in the flat. On the twentieth, he sits on the sofa with Mrs. Hudson, all his things in a pile at the bottom of the stairs.
“It's okay to come back, John,” she says, so quiet and calm. “If you ever think—well. If you ever. He's paid the rent through the end of next year, so you needn't worry about that.”
The tea is cold. The curtains are pulled shut. He lets her take his hand then, and it feels a little less like being lost.
.:.
His new flat is spotless, washed in white. Every room a perfect square, everything clinical. The only things missing are the scalpels, the sutures;
but there is nothing left to mend.
(On his left shoulder, a scar shaped like a supernova. The mirror reflects, memory or oblivion:
He awoke in a hospital in Kandahar and he held the bullet, the one that pierced his skin and muscle and bone. Such a small thing--solid and compact on one end, and opened up like a lotus on the other.
Still wrapped in bandages, still on the morphine (it was only the next morning), he asked, “How close?”
“Two inches from the lung, another two, maybe, from the heart,” said Murray. “Pulled it out with tweezers smaller than my thumb. You’re a lucky fuck.”
John raised an eyebrow and huffed out his disbelief and didn’t know how to say thank you. “Any shrapnel left?”
Murray shook his head. “Got it all. I promise you, I was nearly crawling in there to make sure.”
John almost smiles. “Range of motion?”
“Take it easy. The PTs going to be the worst, worse than the shot itself, I should think. And you’ll need more surgery once you’re home, I’m afraid.”
“Home,” John said, painkillers kicking in, or was it endorphins, and making the room spin till he was dizzy with them. “Home.” That was the part that hurt the worst, the very worst.)
He has been back home for years now. As it turns out, you can take the man out of the desert but you cannot take the desert out of the man. The SIG lies on his bedside table: a miracle, a weight.
.:.
Sometimes, in low lulling lamplight, he reads, he reads, he reads. (Books: uneven stacks by his bedside, a skyline in miniature.) Poetry and science, fiction and medicine. He swallows the words, lets them engulf him. Everything else starts to crumble, fall away.
Sometimes, he lies awake and catalogues things: tonight it is injuries, tonight it is cures. It will have to be Eastern remedies, of course; cures from Lhasa, from the summit, from the peak. G. elegans, heartbreak grass, for the fall; rhodiola sacra for the heart; Jeera water for rejuvenation, for what lies ahead. He tries to imagine Sherlock cross-legged on the floor of a mountaintop monastery, focusing on a dot in the distance that never gets nearer, that never gets farther away.
He can’t. It feels other-worldly, too beautiful to contemplate. Instead he focuses on London, on the landscape he knows: the parish churches of St Marylebone and St Cyprian, and all their jubilant bells; the Eye suspended in a grey, smog-ridden sky; the Houses of Parliament and the Millennium Bridge at night; the bronze woman beneath the Vauxhall Bridge, holding St Paul’s in her eternal hand (where the Thames and the Tyburn meet, once, now, after centuries); Justice above St James’s Square and the Queen of Time above Selfridge’s.
Statuary as obituary; a city for wanderers: aimless, restless, timeless. It is early morning now: he hears the delivery truck pull up outside the deli. Finally, he falls asleep, but he is never still, never heedless; always half-awake, ready to run, even—especially—in dreams.
He has tried, he has tried, to remove the pieces inside himself that are not his own, that do not belong to him. Etherise, cauterise. It is cutting for stone, for relics. (In Rome in the Middle Ages they used the Coliseum as a quarry, stones carted off, heavy thievery.)
In the bath, he sinks below the surface of the water. His arms, outstretched, are anchors against the sides of the bathtub. Water splashes onto the lino. He opens his eyes: floats. (It feels like something else entirely: something never fully realized when he had the chance; something he will spend the rest of his life chasing after.)
II.
The first thing Sherlock does after he hangs up the cheap mobile is destroy it. All boxes ticked. No muss no fuss. The systematic dismantling of his previous life: an unfortunate consequence. (Ah. Yes, of course. The first lie had to come sooner or later.) He goes out to the tiny balcony of his hotel room: St Petersburg in the early evening, St Petersburg in the summertime. (He's not, Sherlock, Molly's voice was muted, tired. He's not okay.)
Now he looks down. A man is helping his young child tie her shoelace. A woman and her mother—yes, it has to be the mother, look at the same high cheekbones, the same sway in the hips—link arms and laugh. A pair of teenagers (perhaps more in love with their mobiles than with each other) sit on a park bench across the avenue.
He shifts on his tired feet. Presses the center of his chest, hard. The sun slips behind the dome of the basilica: a corona red-and-orange, flaming out. It doesn't (breathe) it doesn't hurt.
.:.
All these landscapes are new to him. He goes because he has to, because he can't be anywhere familiar. These foreign fields, these far-flung places are much, he thinks, much like a collection of sepia-toned photographs (seen at the Atlas Gallery, with John, thirty-four weeks ago): beauty without breath, without colour, without movement.
Reykjavik is lost to him entirely, lost to an early winter snowstorm and to the remnants of a migraine, a dull ache that will not go away.
.:.
In a different season, a different hemisphere, he starts having auditory hallucinations. (That voice says can you please not play that thing at three in the morning that voice says what the hell are you doing that voice says are you even trying to care she is nine she could have died.)
He lies flat on the floor, on the worn hotel room floor, and closes his eyes: the words explode like a supernova before he reels them back, swirling, into shapes that replicate like water: perfect, sedate geometry. It whorls as a whole, steady, and when it pulses like a heartbeat, he stills it.
He breathes. It all feels lighter, now. The voice is silent: [null set] [null set] { e m p t y s e t }
He is racing like a pro, the hounds of hell at his heels. No, no: he is at theirs. (In La Paz there is victory: two down, now; no one knows how many to go.)
.:.
Cape Town rests down, down, in an enormous bowl; unarable emptiness beyond it, and sea. The buildings and the people inside them are protected by nature's concave cocoon. From the top of Table Mountain he can see it all: Devil's Peak, Robben Island, the City Bowl. The land beyond is too vast, the scope too solitary, to contemplate.
(That voice says you daft bugger sit down and drink your tea.)
He is standing on the edge. (Over a thousand meters above sea level, low-altitude wind shear blowing south-southwest.) He peers down. Closes his eyes. Leans into the wind.
The wind pushes back.
In a small hotel outside the city, there is an even smaller back garden. There, he looks at the night sky: Alpha Centauri; the nebula of Orion, the hunter; the crux (but not the false cross, no). The Milky Way is a billowing tunnel cradling a fragile planet; a series of them (eight, in fact). It is cold and distant, and it is real.
.:.
For a while, he stops. No more running, or running after. For a while, he wears disguises like armor. He is a post-doctoral candidate, a widower, an engineer. It hurts, the way he has always imagined chemical fragmentation must. For once, he lets it.
.:.
(i have built this four-walled city for you, my burning sun, dug the earth and carved the ninety-nine names of god into your tomb with my own two grieving hands until they fell around me as dust: o noble, o magnificent, o glorious!)
He had always thought he would see the Taj Mahal before his thirty-fifth birthday, and he is right, by two days. (With: a first-class ticket bought with money from an off-shore account; the terrible accent and shoes of a lost American tourist; a stunning if academic knowledge of Ayurveda.) When he does, when he sees it up close (the sun bright overhead, Surah 98 running through his head like water) he tells himself rather carefully that he could never fathom, never fathom such fire.