Work Text:
No one you know is a good person
Fast, reckless driving often leads to slow, sad music
Early February, 0000.
The sky was that kind of mottled grey it always is when it’s supposed to be black, but too many lights are on all over. Snow painted the roads sparkly white under the streetlamps, and then, I thought I knew why I was going where I was.
My stride was nothing confident; not even anything resembling it. I was downcast, and I had been thinking about doing it again, but then this opportunity presented itself– you know– to feel something; so I accepted the invitation.
I walked in through the back door, shudderingly cold and somewhat apprehensive. Sure, I knew the guy who was hosting, but not well enough to feel good showing up alone. But he was like me in that way; he knew why I was here.
My boots were all covered in snow from walking, and I hadn’t worn gloves because my last pair was no good anymore. But he found me, and took my hand and told me where I ought to be: whisked my coat away to a room I never saw the inside of because it was too loud for me to focus on anything except the intermittent flashes of warm bodies, amber bottles, and pulsing music that passed me by. Everything was sleazy blue until I was thrust into four walls of dusty white.
He gave me what I wanted and I paid my fare. I took it a bit too quickly from his hands, and he looked at me funny– but I needed it more than anything. More than him, anything outside, or a new pair of gloves. I shut the door.
It was quieter in the bathroom, everything muffled to a contented hum. Music from beyond the plaster shook me softly, an easy vibration I was used to and welcomed as I’d welcome any part of the ritual I was about to begin; like an old friend, except the friend wasn’t someone I hadn’t seen for a while. She went wherever I did. Unlike the host, I knew her very well.
The gushing of water from the tap silenced the scene a bit. I know what people say is in it, what they’re putting in us. But I always thought of it more as an ironic joke— from the silencing of hearts comes truth in a form they never anticipated; collateral damage.
Cedocore can do whatever they want to me so long as I’ve got the means to make the best of it.
So I let it get inside of me.
I wanted it there.
It felt nice. Kind of lukewarm, but nice.
The isopropyl was cool on my pink, frostbitten hands as I applied it to the tops of them; a small, dull sting like icicles issued forth from my veins. I had the gel dressings all figured out, ready, and it didn’t take long before I was sitting on my jacket, fishnets touching the ground. I held my back against the door and sprawled my legs across the floor.
Waiting is the worst part. I wasn’t even sure if this new method was going to work, but some people on the Mailstrom had talked about it highly. I just wanted something. Anything. Even if it didn’t work, I would have found something else somewhere. Opal isn’t hard to come by, but what matters is if it’s pure; half the stuff they’ve been pushing lately is cut with over-the-counter junk that just makes your skin get all itchy and cause the high to dwindle faster.
Sometimes, though, you have to take what you can get.
The room was so small that my feet touched the bathtub. The walls, tile, and everything else were all asylum white and rimmed in a reassuring, familiar grime. It smelled a little like mildew, a bit like rot. There was a small window on the wall opposite the countertop/sink/mirror propped up by an empty flower vase. Cool air filtered in through, and mould congealed over the screen.
Just outside, I saw the falling snow, white and unabating, as I waited and waited. But the snow made me think of things I wasn’t fond of thinking about, like death and the cold and what could have been if I’d just done something different; so I looked at the tiles instead. The dirt around them.
I wondered idly what she might’ve been doing then: What she’d say, seeing me like this. What she’d do to me if just–
If it wasn’t so–
What life we’d have led,
If they didn’t–
The sound of my name on her tongue, soft, like the snow,
“Oh,”
It all hit me, then: the pull, so strong I thought I was going to break in two, eased away by the push, like listless murmurs of time just, slow, slow, slowing down.
The tension in my shoulders waxed over, only to be replaced by a different kind of tension; a feeling like someone was holding me tight to their chest. A church steeple and small, seraphic glances during Sunday mass, followed by hard, callow hands on soft, soporific skin in my bedroom. I couldn’t move and I didn’t want to move– it felt so good.
It felt so good.
It felt so good my brain started to get fuzzy.
It felt so good, and I thought I’d like to look at the window again.
It felt so good that I turned my head from where it was tucked between my knees and looked,
At the hills and the snow that fell a little slower than before,
And my heart started to thump harder, harder than before, because as lightning cracked and thunder screamed all over the deep grey, I saw something behind the veil of snow that I
That I didn’t think I was–
Supposed to see.
Blacker than the sky, like four, five pillars above the ground. Sinking into it, drilling into the dirt but– stationary. Idle.
I was not alone.
Terror thrilled all throughout me, pinpricks of fear that put eyes on my back and backs on my eyes. A shadow moved behind the shower curtain, and I was so certain there was something there, but when I mustered up the courage to check, there was nothing beyond it—just hair on the wall and a used-up bottle of conditioner knocked over in the tub that was sent clattering down by my flitting pull.
Paranoid, I looked everywhere I could for a set of eyes. Under the counter, in the cupboards, out the window, behind the curtain again; yet I couldn’t find anything because it wasn’t outside, or hiding anywhere in the room–
It was inside of me.
I felt it, sliding across my spine, all hot and soft and tingly; not a thing but a presence of a thing, of feeling, of sensation, and it began to fill me up from my digital and metacarpal veins, wax-like, waning inside me.
The floor rose up to meet me, my cheek hard on the tile, but all I felt was softness. The hot feeling filled me almost all the way up and met my heart and I felt a shudder like nothing I’d ever felt before– a beatific, amatory flutter kissed me all over as the heat in my torso met the heat in my legs.
Sent over the edge, I sighed. I sighed and I sighed and I sighed.
I had passed through the ring.
My muscles, rippling. My legs, shaking. I threw my head back and gasped and curled upward against the floor, but I don’t think I made any noise. I couldn’t. It had me by the throat and I let it take me that way; by the neck and outside of my skin. A little bit of it seeped out of me and settled on my outside like a glove.
I watched from a corner of my brain as my body got up and left the bathroom, into the hazy sight of strung-up party decorations and rainbow reflections and a sea of morphing physiognomy.
The cosmos were baking inside of my stomach and little electric currents were thrumming through me like exposed telephone wires sparking up. My body fell onto the couch and I thought that I was going to burst out in tempestuous, uncontrolled sighs, but the wax/heat/warmth/presence flowed away from everywhere but my middle before I could give in, where it swirled around in wait.
I touched where I thought it was with fingers I barely registered as mine, and suddenly the world was not this one.
Dull blue landscape, sandy, desiccated soil. I had legs and I could see my boots, black and dusty and still wet from the slush. That presence was still in me, though– pulsing and swirling and expanding like a cyclone. Pushing, pulling, before it abruptly jumped out of me and sent me tumbling to the floor, of which there was no longer one. Empty. So empty.
There were no boots anymore. Just a frothy azure, speckled with something I came to recognize as burning stars and satellites. So many satellites.
Space.
A dot, tiny, but full of texture; swarthy dark clouds, and plumes of what looked like smoke. The dot was a myriad of colours that ranged from blue to green to beige and white. But the green and blue were scarce, just small strokes of paint on a larger canvas. The beige was leeching into everything else. An infection. I could almost see it moving.
I reached out with a hand I created from just thinking about having one and touched another, fear and paranoia and lightning jolting through me. I wanted to hide– I didn’t want to be here anymore, and I missed the euphoria, the bathroom floor and the sighing and the warmth– but then, from nowhere, there was a large, dark, shadowy organism holding me in this void. A giant palm.
Its fingers closed around me like bars.
Thrashing about, peering through the window-like slats of the hand’s fingers, I could see different places and different worlds I knew it wanted me to see, fearful and trembling as I was. It wanted me scared. It was right for me to be. I wondered absently if it could feel me trembling and gnashing my teeth. Shaking, like how I did when she left.
Between the index and middle finger, was me: lying in the dark on the loveseat, my lips parted, my posture slack, lights dancing around me like blinking traffic lights or that big Christmas tree they show us on TV. So small. Could that really be me? So small and insignificant? It hurt to look at. I didn’t want to think about how small I was. Just a speck of dust. Something caught in a larger cog. Spin, spin, spinning.
It shifted.
Between the middle and forefinger was a mass of blue and teal and foamy white that writhed and flowed, beautiful. The Arctic Ocean, something told me as the salt tickled my nose; as the seafoam washed over me, and water filled up the palm. I curled myself up all small and watched the water move, and felt myself move within its womb. Tranquility. The currents met one another, Antarctic and Arctic. Warm as they reached the top. Serenity. My heart slowed back down again, and I could feel my bones begin to lock and release, lock and release and release, finally, into pure bliss.
Somewhere, a mountain felt the kiss of the sea where it hadn’t before.
Somewhere, its peaks were seldom blessed with snow.
Somewhere, a family of six tears off all the clothes they own because this summer is hotter than the one that came before it.
No, not bliss. The water kept coming. But this time it was cold, freezing, and I felt it slide down my throat and invade me, perpetually rushing. It didn’t stop. The agony didn’t stop. Chunks of ice, melting before they could even begin to start forming again. Glacier debris and dirt coagulated in my mouth while somewhere on some plane a factory plumed out giant bushels of smoke, and the atmosphere started to choke on it, and someone leaned back and watched it happen. I started to scream, and I felt everything scream with me when all of a sudden an orange, blistering blossom of fire shot up from the very bottom of the ocean. It was happening to me, and I was watching it happen.
It was happening to everybody.
I was the ocean, I was the world, and then I felt everything it feels and continues to feel. The fire kept burning over the waves, flames licking the contours of my body so violently, this time, I couldn’t voice my agony. It was settled deep within my chest like a nail bomb, scorching, tearing and ripping me apart from the inside. Lying down on the stars, I felt settlers begin to pave roadways and skyscrapers and landfills all over my skin, cutting away at the flesh and letting the scraps all souse in between my thighs. Little pinpricks of pain from the acid and nuclear waste colouring me radioactive green. Pockets carved out to store it all away because if we can’t see it maybe it’s not even there. Maybe she won’t feel it.
But she does and it hurts. It hurt so terribly.
I started to cough because of all the bad stuff in the air. An aspirator sucking me dry. In my muscles, there are little settlers with their hands over their mouths, gasping at all they’ve done to me.
Why me? I wanted so badly to yell.
Why are you showing me all of this?
Putting me through all of this pain?
I felt it for a little while longer. The pain of the people carving canyons into my soil. I wanted to curse them, to send down a plague and just be done with everything. Locusts would swarm over them, and they’d all disappear, and whatever would be left would be their fault.
But one of them got close, right next to my right eye. It seemed hesitant– just wading around by the fleshy pink of the lacrimal caruncle, uncertain. It got closer, closer, and I noticed she was shaking, like she didn’t know why she was there. She got closer, closer, and I was met with my own face, staring back at me. Her eyes wide.
I’m the one making the poison.
I’m the one who’s hurting everybody.
She walked up to the sclera, holding something.
But before she could arc down the knife, the palm took me back.
Back to my body and back to the blue field with the craggy weeds and soil. I had arms. Legs. I could see my boots again. It lay me down on the ground softly, and I just stayed there a moment.
I closed my eyes, and in the darkness of my eyelids, someone was kneeling before me with their hands in my hair, wiping my tears away and stroking my hair. Their love was nothing like the wax/heat/warmth/presence, but I found myself sighing anyway, the pain flowing out of my fingertips with every breath they took. I could hear the swing of her cross around their neck. The one that once swung over me like a clock chime. Cherry and powder and amber and wood all swirled around inside my head, as sweet as they used to be, but as if proving its point one last time, just to spite me, those infinitesimal whispers of her were erased by the ring of a gunshot.
Look at what they did to her.
Look. Be upset. Be mean.
Wake up.
My eyes fluttered open and once more met the dirt, the blue– and as I pushed myself up off the ground– the hand.
Off in the distance, looming over the hills, wreathed in clouds. Five fingers from the heavens surrounded by a field of spikes protruding from the ground. A place of no honour. A place we left to rot. A place that we will see soon if it does not intervene.
It was so lucid. I walked and felt the crunch of the crumbling earth beneath my feet, the stiff air circulating the field. Reality– just another subsection of it. Drones of noise, fragile and foreboding, chimed from the architecture. Everything in me was yelling that I shouldn’t be going further. But I didn’t care anymore. I just didn’t. The spikes guided me nearer.
Terror welling up in my chest, I climbed the hill up to where the hand was, beautiful and black and saccharine. Nothing like God, but sanct in its own right.
I pressed my forehead against the tip of one of its fingers.
I nodded my head as it told me what it needed to do.
Yes, I understand.
I’m no good. I’ve always known that.
You’re right.
I’ll go away now.
They’ll plug me up with needles and tell me I’m dreaming.
Anyway, there’s nothing left for me here.
Until then,
I’ll wait for you to reach down through,
Scared to death
Down here
in the great dark.