thank you, your writing is absolutely lovely as well
Crunch. Footsteps behind him. Reader, the following series of events all happened in a few milliseconds.
The sound of these footsteps were strange. With growing intensity and for no particular reason, his brain hammers out it's a bear, it's a bear IT'S A BEAR OH MY GOD RUN—
He wrenches his head around. His neck cracks with the motion, his C1, C2 vertebrae, they're all screaming. He's breathing like a locomotive and sweating all over. Goddamn chemicals in the brain. Goddamn amygdala. No, it's just a boy. An incomplete, one-eyed boy. Taylor begins the meticulous process of Appearing Like A Normal and Sane Person: reserving a conference room, getting all his ducks in a row, updating the resume. Those sort of things. Maybe even a smile.
There's a lot going on behind those blue eyes.
A long pause. A long, painful pause. This is all he knew how to do: to stare, to observe, to take Xeroxes of normalcy. The tension leaves him like a rolling skein.
Sure you didn't.
Two words in, he tastes blood and has to start swallowing. All he can think about is how much blood you can swallow without getting sick. He can feel the cut in his mouth like a ridge in the great, wet, rolling terrain. His lips and teeth are sticky with blood.
You forgot to make your eyes normal, Taylor. Have I been staring the whole time? I want a mirror.
Muscle memory. That Xerox of normalcy is falling apart in his head. It's a copy of a copy of a copy, there's bound to have been some mistakes made. There was a man back where you lived whose leg was so badly hurt that all the blood was blocked up to the knee. When they tried to fix him that black blood went up straight to his brain and he died, terribly.
He kevlars his fingers together, steeples them. Just a nervous young man with sleeves billowing off the wrists. Sure...you didn't.
And then it developed that Merrick was going to come closer after all. Estimated time of contact: a dwindling amount of seconds. Soon, they'd be breathing the same air molecules. The thought drives a shudder through him. Electricity racing up and down the highway line.
Every time his heart beats, takeoff and landing, he begs for a crash.
All the ticking in his brain is driving him mad. All the beeping in the control center. The levers and gears are going haywire and eating themselves and it is just the grind of metal against metal. His thoughts die helpless, fodder for fire in the fuselage. The windows of the cockpit, tinted black. I know,
he grits out, I know what you're doing.
Paranoia, hijacker of planes and armer of children.
Call me Fields,
he says, just so he could retain a single mode of control. You've heard of this before. You've heard of this, in the stories about murderers who after having just killed a man, go out and play some board games and do the dishes at home.
A step forwards, a step backwards. Some sick interpretive dance. The single eye burns and burns like the end of a cigarette and the afterimage is copy pasted everywhere he looks, everytime he blinks. He's learning what an ashtray feels like everytime a red cherry's being extinguished.
He won't allow me to do the job interview with blood on my face. I'm going to get it all over my business cards. My fucking cufflinks. What are you doing? You know, you know and that's why,
Breathe. That's why you're smiling.
Isn't it? It's so hard to keep track of what he's thinking and what he's saying. The skin between reality and unreality is so porous. Osmosis, electrochemical gradients, dispersion.
You think you can fix me?
He's turned all flat. All flat, like the edges of a stealth bomber. Tangent lines, a matte surface. Unknowable. Unreadable. Only a smile.
Caught off guard, knocked into foreign territory. There are two things that are clear:
one, he has never been so present in his life, and
two, he has never been told that there was, in fact, not a single thing wrong with him.
This must be what falling in reverse feels like. Being upended into the sky. He's giddy. He's hurtling through the universe at a hundred meters per second. Red shift, blue shift. Gamma rays that scream along the cosmic underbelly. Merrick is so close. The whites of his eyes, they shine in the shade. All his life, he's wanted nothing but sleep. In this moment, he is so awake that it's painful.
Say it,
he lets the blood drip down the corner of his mouth. Say it again.
He's gritting his teeth so hard that his jaw is beginning to shake, the paper-thin veins at his temples are wild and dilated and hammering. Like the bees in the hive. Those mindless architects. Not even my...parents. How?
The stream of consciousness has turned into rapids, aching and hungry.
Face-to-face, nose-to-nose, the sun casts a venus flytrap shadow over that single eye. That single eye, pulsing and roiling like a stomach. The dark face. The red shoulders. The bare neck. This is like waking up in an airport, having to set your watch back, the signs lit up with a language you've never heard of.
They were wrong, he says, and Taylor takes it as gospel. There is a young man sitting during Mass; when the wafer is passed to his mouth, it bursts into flame.
Let's try this, Taylor
burn
hiss
hurt
The air, it tastes like smoke, like sweat, the waste of a living creature, all its cells, all its conveyor belts, the factories. It also tastes of Merrick. He swallows. I should've.
He turns away, closes his eyes, breathes in through his mouth and out through his nose, slow and metered. When he returns back to his stare, something has shifted. Has clicked. I believe that one day, a great rain will come. And it will wash the trash and the scum away.
Taylor smiles again, but this time there is something terribly wrong with the smile— whether its the blood climbing up between the cracks or the degree of which his facial muscles had pivoted or how his eyes remained staring, constant, the pupil whittled down to a pinprick. He had never truly learned to smile.
Every nerve, awake and exposed and shrieking. He had never truly learned to live.
Let me help you,
he wrestles these words out from his miserly lungs. His heart was scrawling across octaves and tempos like it was no big deal. He wears this new emotion like a tailored suit, cups it in his hands, disinterested mad scientist. To clean the world.
So close. So close that he sees nothing but Merrick.
A pause. A beat. A breath, all of these, tinged with blood. They cannot touch us.
The feeling of being an empty, rushing metro terminal. The feeling of being a mouthpiece to something indescribable. To be a weapon.
What a cruel laugh. This was the closest a voice box made of muscle ever got to replicating a computer's Shephard tones. Meanwhile, the other part of him is busying away at manufacturing the closest thing to an emotion he could feel. A copy of a copy of a chemical. Everywhere, Photostats were teeming.
A vision of himself pushing his finger into that singular eye. And how would his skull look, concave and leaking? What would you do if you had the world in your hand? He asks someone in his head. Make a fist. When they respond, it is in Merrick's voice. Soon enough, he's laughing too, coughing out through his gritted teeth like smoke through a car grille.
With a haunted expression, he closes the gap between them, and seizes the air above Merrick's torn ear. The movement is accompanied by a sound. Something deep in his throat, where after thousands of years of evolution, a complex mechanism that could emit such feral and base noise.
His eyes widen, then narrow, the cleanest pivot the facial muscles can manage under the nuclear onslaught. In his bunker, inside of his skull, he turns over, moans. The red-eye effect, glistening teeth in the dark, the sickly and dead sheen of night-vision— these were all Merrick.
These were all Taylor too. They had too much in common.
Breathing hard. Sweating under an operating light. The muscles you use to smile, well, they're the same you use to snarl. Taste mine.
That clean drip of blood. Like someone drawing a line to split his chin into two. His teeth, his head, are still ringing from the snap. To think he had been sleeping just a few minutes before. This was a whole other world.
The red drop fattens, becomes bottom-heavy.
It stretches. It becomes unbearable.
Capillary action. It's so familiar. Like nickel. One carbon-based organism to another. This is where Taylor submits. This is where he moves forwards and aims to duck his head just beneath Merrick's chin from sternum to scapula. To feel the vibration, the up-and-down of his breath.
Terrible and beautiful in equal parts. Merrick must be real. His own mind couldn't have possibly engineered something so complete, so close. After the brief spark from a fired gun, smoke arises. I have nothing. You have everything. Go ahead.
He wants to fell ivory towers with him. To beat up businessmen and cut his knuckles on their veneers. Justice for those who have nothing to lose. Fingers tight around collared necks and pinstripe ankles. From far away, a gavel as an electrocardigogram. Thump, thump, thump.
Your claim,
he breathes. Blood gets on the floor, on the carpet. What do you call it?
It. With it, there comes a bubble of blood. He wonders if Merrick can feel this too. The feeling of being calcified into history. Of becoming myth. Making history is like pressing a scalpel to skin: the tension, the resistance, the break.
Shame, ecstasy, neurosis, rampaging around his head, persued by an utter calm.
He is never going to sleep again.
we can fade here?
Ursus, he says. Taylor mouths it— purses his lips, the touch, release, touch of his tongue at his front teeth. The air hissing out, it's all that he can hear, careening through the fine bones in his head. The shudder of an instrument. Up his spine. The shudder of photons in the beam of a nuclear explosion.
It's mask off, but he doesn't feel like he's been stuck between two glass slides and into a microscope. It's a feeling that other people who are more emotionally inclined would call belonging, but poor ignorant Taylor just holds it in his hands, feels the weight of it, brushes the dust off and places it in a drawer full of numbered files.
Poor Taylor. Poor Merrick.
I know you will already do that, he says. Taylor only smiles. You know me so well, he thinks, and that's why I know you so well. He's not used to being known. He's not sure he likes it. But he thinks that he will make an exception just this once. Take me there.
Not like he has anywhere else to go.