I Dream Of Mirrors

by Chris Kelso

  ‘You don’t seriously believe all this BS about us being animals hooked up to a computer, do you? What a load of baloney!’

  ‘I’m not saying I believe it, I’m just saying…what if?’

  ‘We can’t afford to have ‘what ifs’! That’s when the day seekers get you and Dunwoody brainwashes you into thinking he’s Harry Krishna!’ – She regulates the volume of her voice to a disgruntled whisper for the sake of the slumbering Ailsa. I do the same.

  ‘That won’t happen, trust me…’

  ‘You told me once when we were drunk one time, back at the Aerial Hotel, that you didn’t trust your own willpower. You called yourself ‘weak-minded’.’

  ‘Well, hey, maybe I’m a retarded farm animal! Maybe I’ve been pumped full of drugs and hormones. Maybe that’s why I’m weak-minded!’

  - Maybe…

  Kad sighs and makes for the door. On the way out, she says she’s hitting the supply stores for provisions. I call after her, tell her I’ll come help her loot, but she ignores me and closes the door with a thump. Good job ‘Kurt’…

  Our balcony view would’ve been of the council building across the road - a geodesic dome made of tempered glass. Dunwoody’s face leers out from it and from behind the curtain walls of each skyscraper. Ailsa untangles herself from her ball on the floor like an onyx Adder. She stretches her arms out while yawning.

  ‘Kind of vicious, weren’t you?’ – She says, wiping the grog from the corners of her eyes. I notice a bruise around her neck, like rope burns.

  ‘Vicious?’

  I can’t believe how good she looks. My hunger returns. Before I know it, I have her pinned against the wall of the bridal suite, my fingers clutched around her tiny, slender shoulders with far too much vigour. The brute rises from within. What the fuck am I doing?

  ‘I’ll show you vicious…’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Yeah!’

  A sexual force pulsates through me like electricity, something that has haunted my internal devices for what feels like an age, jacking my heart and stirring the fluid in my gut to a boiling frenzy. I feel the hard dick shrink my underwear. I need her. I’ve been bitten by the vampire of lust. I throw her to the floor. Ailsa is as light and fragile as I imagined her to be. She lets me exert myself, stabs me with a stiff tongue—my first kiss.

  She begs me to choke her, to throttle her hard until she starts making a wheezing sound and her eyeballs rinse white and she climaxes without any need for penetration.

  ‘Choke me! Choke me!’

  I tell Ailsa to get on all fours – she obeys - and I start peeling her leggings down to the backs of her knees. I observe the fleshy knolls of her presented buttocks for a moment, marvelling and utterly possessed by arousal, before thrusting my face between the cleft. I lap at salt and battery acid-sharp sweat, enjoy the taste of her natural juices so much that I let out an involuntary snarl. I become even more aware of the strong, burning hard-on tucked tightly into my underwear and of its desire to be freed.

  Then, I’m unbuckled and mounting the girl. I don’t ask, I just take. The territoriality. The sheer sense of belonging. Of intimacy. Confidence swells in my skull. I feel awake and more cognisant than I ever have before.

  Have I just this minute come online? I am aware of being judged by my lower dimensions. A paranoid thought whirrs through my mind and takes up a fixed residence with schizophrenic passion.

  My penis.

  Does it make the grade?

  Eventually the thought scatters when lust takes complete control,

  It feels like the first time.

  ***

  I had not intended to use Ailsa in this way, as an object for such intense carnal perversions, but here I am. Cupid paints blind I suppose. I suppose.

  Her eyes are not deep, yet they hold me like a speck of light in a sunbeam. Ailsa’s irises reflect back at me when we have sex. I feel like I’m fucking myself into the abyss. I have to hand it to the girl though - she picked up the shattered pieces of me and tried her best to give them back to me in the correct order. But I am an impossible puzzle.

  ‘We can’t do this again.’ – I say this after disgorging. If it’s any consolation, I feel like a complete asshole.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s getting too serious already. I don’t want that for you.’

  ‘Is this serious?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You don’t want anything serious?’

  ‘What does that even mean? Serious?’

  - You know what serious means in this context you prick.

  She sighs, but her sigh is a question I cannot answer. Ailsa roles off me.

  ‘Kurt, I’ve given you all and now I am nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ailsa.’

  She embraces me again, this ruined man-thing. I’ve looked at this face too long now, seen too many mirrors, dreamt too often of smashing my body into a million jagged shards. I embrace Ailsa back. And I embrace her airbrushed perfectness.

  I want to ask about the bruise around her neck but get a sense that, if she did try to unsuccessfully kill herself once before, then she made the decision to do so on her own and no amount of talking about it would change her mind if she took the notion to try again.

  Her features are as perfect and symmetrical as the city. Together it works; we are both seeking something we can’t otherwise obtain. I could never love this girl though. Fucking her only made me realise that my heart belongs to another.

  She pulls her head up to look at me with those dead spherical fish eyes, her make-up still flawless.

  ‘You should know something.’

  ‘Mm?’ – I ask, buckling up my trousers and heaving my body from the crime scene floor.

  ‘I know you’re not a real person, fake somehow.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  - Fuck. She knows…

  ‘It’s okay. I still feel the same for you. I can just…tell you’re not human. The way you feel, inside and out, it’s not natural. You have shallowness to you. Like one of the insects, like the arachnids.’

  Ailsa’s indictment catches me off guard. ‘Unnatural’, ‘fake’, ‘shallow’ - these are exactly the same adjectives I’d use to describe her!

  ‘You think I’m fake and shallow?’

  ‘Well…yeah. I’m not trying to upset you, I’m just being honest, and I hope you believe me when I say I like those aspects of who you are. I’m shallow and fake too. We work well.’

  She was right.

  ‘Don’t worry. I know you can’t love me, you’re not capable. I couldn’t love anything more than my daughter or my ex-husband anyway.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘They’re…somewhere else entirely.’

  The pristine white of the nameless conglomerate buildings burns through the plywood-girded French doors of the bridal suite. I must admit, the light continues to compel me.

  ‘I think I’m going to die here Ailsa.’

  ‘Me too. Manhattan was supposed to be my quiet place to die. I was meant to die there.’

  ‘Why Manhattan?’

  ‘Fuck knows. I meet people like me all the time. People just looking for a quiet place to die. Whoever suggested Manhattan was out of their fucking mind.’

  - It must be better than this place, honey.

  Ailsa and I get clothed and tidy up the place a little for Kad’s return. She bursts back in, all out of breath and bloodied, just as I tuck my shirt into my waistline. I feel a new layer of sweat gloss my forehead and down my back – so this is what the fear of almost getting caught is like?

  What a rush.

  ‘What happened?’ – Ailsa asks, masking her flushed, just-fucked face with expert ease. Kad takes a moment to regain a steadier breathing pattern. I’m paranoid the hotel room smells like forbidden sex.

  ‘The zombies…The People, they’re fucking everywhere. Even the witches, the other factions, they’re all converted. I got chased back to the hotel. I’m sure I lost ‘em.’<
br />
  ‘Least you’re alright.’ - Ailsa possesses a kind of blithe nonchalance that I just can’t relate to

  Kad lost her rucksack during the escape. Ailsa and I go in to wrap our arms around her to comfort, but she backs away from both of us like we’ve got the plague.

  Does she know what happened between us? Can she smell the brine of illicit fucking?

  Is she angry?

  Why would she be?

  There’s been no indication Kad has any romantic inclinations towards me whatsoever. It might hurt my chances if I ever want to declare any feelings for her down the line. I wouldn’t worry about that. I don’t have the balls to express myself anyway…

  Ailsa

  Spiders are everywhere, roaming. Everywhere. Kurt…

  This city is teeming with them. It’s gotten so I can’t turn a corner or pass someone on the street without coming face to face with one of the bastards. They look and act like us, assume the forms of people we know and love. Underneath though, well, that’s a different story.

  Before you know what’s what they’re shitting webs out their asses and scaling the condominiums to report back to their superiors. When I get home, they’re hiding under my couch, conducting reconnaissance missions across my kitchen counter.

  The laundry room outside my apartment building is infested! You can’t just give them a wide berth because they’re fucking everywhere.

  I told myself Kurt, I said this will be my last novel, my ‘drunk’ novel. I feel like I’m soberer drunk than when I haven’t touched a drop. Things seem so much clearer after a few. I realise that, soberly, I have NOTHING to say. Nothing new, certainly.

  At least drunkenly I can channel some form of genuine, authentic emotion into writing – even if it is just drunken gibberish. My sober novels are awful. My sober novels make my own children disappear. Maybe my drunken ones will be better.

  They couldn’t be any worse surely?

  I’m going to tell you about me, Ailsa Atkins – a distinctly unremarkable person. An underachiever, broken-hearted wanderer of a lonely, indifferent town in a cultureless landscape.

  This is my life. I have always made bad decisions. I know there is nothing new here, but if we probe a little, maybe…?

  In Manhattan, my daughter and I drive across the East River with no particular destination in mind. That’s how I know Dunwoody isn’t a prophet, that’s how I know he’s lying about where we came from. I was a person once. Not an animal.

  The Manhattan Bridge swaying over the great gulf of water and I’m sure my 10-year-old daughter and I both fantasised about the suspension wires snapping and us both being swallowed up by the great black gorge.

  So, I pull the car over. We get out, head to the footpath and brood into the East River. A jogger hurtles by. He’s wearing earphones and listening to alien mind control transmissions.

  The view is beautiful. Most people prefer the Brooklyn Bridge but not me, although maybe I’m biased. There are no sad reflective memories associated with the Manhattan side.

  My husband and I used to walk the Brooklyn Bridge at Sunset, and then head to the Promenade, down Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. This is a long time ago, before my daughter came along and long before I started fantasizing about this glass city. Before the spiders.

  I ask if she’s okay. She shrugs, reaches across to scratch her shoulder.

  ‘I said, you okay kiddo?’

  Another shrug.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  I remember that my daughter had been moodier than usual lately. They say 10 is a difficult age for a girl, we used to dread her 13th birthday. It might also have something to do with the fact that my husband, her father, left us for a chief inspector and covert agent a few months before. His new girlfriend has since converted him. They live together in the Lincoln Tower on the Upper West Side. I haven’t seen them since I came to this city.

  Despite the fact his allegiances have turned I still love him, and, I know it’s terrible to say it, but my daughter was the tenuous link between my ex-husband and I. Occasionally we met in passing and exchange perfunctory greetings, pretending to have moved on with our lives.

  But how could I be over that? I love him.

  ‘Do you know about the Slave State?’

  I ask her, referring to a lame book I read in high school. She shakes her head – no.

  ‘You know how mother writes books?’

  She nods – uh, huh.

  ‘Well, that’s what she writes about. Stuff like the Slave State.’

  Having never previously showed an interest in my books or their content, I knew this might be a hard sell. My daughter wasn’t interested in anything - except video games and, probably, a strong subconscious desire to die which she probably inherited from her old mother.

  Spiders are everywhere and I’m talking to a 10-year-old about the Slave State.

  The Staten Island ferry chugs into view and no one on board looks bothered by the arachnid onslaught.

  ‘You see all this around you? The big buildings and the cluster of humanity? Well, it’s bullshit baby.’

  ‘I know.’

  The statement takes me off guard.

  ‘You do?’

  She nods.

  ‘What’re your theories?’

  She shrugs – ‘I don’t have any theories. I just always knew it was bullshit.’

  We wait in silence a moment as a cyclist whizzes past, as if he might be a spy listening in to our conversation. He disappears down the footpath towards the gleaming metal chopsticks of the Manhattan skyline.

  A megadose of adrenaline is surging through my brain and body – even just recollecting it makes me relive the feeling. For the first time in my entire relationship with my daughter I feel like we are connecting. I don’t probe her any further about the Slave State, it’s enough that she is sceptical.

  She’ll come to the reality of things on her own terms. I feel a surge of something else. It could be pride. I made this kid and he’s as beautifully aware of himself and his environment as any hardened conspiracy theorist. I remember thinking, this is the future of humanity. This kid right here, my kid. I reach out to put my hand on her shoulder, but I remember something…I remember I never had a daughter.

  I’m not a writer either, never was. I was a model and a skateboarder. I was at Mount Trashmore, one of only three women boarding professionally at the time.

  I feel the hope fade away as my waking dream dissipates. I fill up with a nasty energy. The nasty energy has never left me. I wonder if my husband is still with the chief inspector Slave State agent…I start wondering if I’m even on the Manhattan Bridge.

  So, what’s next? – I thought. What’s the next daydream? Did I ever have a daughter?

  I look back at my car. The concave façade of the skyscrapers has focused a spotlight of sunshine on it and melted the wing mirrors. The tyres have been burst and the bonnet is jacked open. Someone has been checking the engine.

  Another jogger speeds past. This was the first time I heard the spiders scuttling. Now they’re back. You can only outrun them for so long…

  So, I climb over the steel railings, loud subway trains rumble by on four different tracks overhead. I’m compelled to explore the guts of the bridge.

  The sea is roaring below, the residue of my ghost daughter still palmed across my brain and internal structures like sodium cyanide. I try to shake it off. The Black Dog bursts free from its kennel, scales the barbed wire mesh of the holding pen and bolts with ferocious intent down the streets, darkness trailing in its wake. I see the skyline fall beneath a shadow.

  On the underpass, I hear a noise coming from above me. Rats scratching around in the girders. Spiders conglomerating. My eyes follow the steel planks and I locate the source of the scratching. It seems someone has constructed a base between the girders using wood, probably discarded materials from nearby Chinatown.

  I climb up the rail and carefully lift the cardboard trap door. The base is roughly ten f
eet-by-one-and-a-half feet and protected with bike locks. A make-shift hideout from the coming invasion, shelter from the spiders, Dunwoody and the starving blackness.

  The city is about to be overrun by mongrels and insects. The hallucinations are only the beginning.

  I remember tearing up the wood and pulling down the previous tenant’s belongings, including pots, bedsheets, clothing and even electrical items. I don’t know who lived there before I came along, but I concluded that I was evicting them. It’s a Black Dog eats Black dog world out there.

  I’ll hide out here – I thought. I’ll write myself a new reality. I’ve read so much about the Slave State that it started penetrating my consciousness. Then I woke up here.

  I’m sick of this plague. The Black Dog was always bound to come back, get its revenge. Hell - revenge implies that the last time it fought humanity it lost. It didn’t lose. It can’t lose.

  You certainly can’t win.

  You just can’t win…

  What must the world be like for a man who has never loved himself or felt the love of another? It must taste a little like waking up in this place every day…

  Six -

  ‘Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge…’

  - Jay McInerney

  I wake up before Kad on the four-post bed. She’s spread-eagled across my legs, so when I go to move I wind up stirring her into consciousness with me. Kad growls under her breath at being woken prematurely.

  I look around for Ailsa. Not in the living room. No sign of her in the kitchenette. Not in the bathroom or out in the lobby.

  My cock is still half-stiff at the thought of her one-dimensionality. I’m convinced her soul scraped stare will never leave me.

  ‘Where’s Ailsa?’ - I ask Kad who is still a little bleary but fully pissed off.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she went out or something.’

  ‘Out? Without saying anything to either of us?’